Joe Biden is traveling to Poland on Friday, to a town near the Ukrainian border. The American president is on the front line of the Western commitment once morest the invasion launched by Moscow, which looks more and more like a war of attrition.
In Ukraine, the situation of the city of Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, heavily bombarded, is deteriorating further, the Ukrainians denouncing the ‘mass’ deportation of inhabitants towards Russia. The mayor of Mariupol, Vadim Boychenko, advanced Thursday evening on Telegram a last assessment of 15,000 inhabitants taken “by force” on board buses, as well as “the confiscation of Ukrainian passports” of inhabitants stuck there.
About 300 dead are feared in the theater of Mariupol bombarded by the Russian air force on March 16 while hundreds of people were sheltered there, announced Friday the town hall of the city, citing witnesses.
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov says his paramilitary militia, which fights alongside the Russian army, has taken over the town hall of this strategic port city. Information impossible to confirm from an independent source. And the Ukrainian army ensures that Mariupol has not yet fallen.
Russian television broadcast aerial images of a city presented as Mariupol, with devastated buildings, blaming the devastation of the place on Ukrainian ‘nationalists’.
Deaths in Kharkiv
The offensive continues elsewhere in the country, following deadly strikes Thursday in Kharkiv, the second city of the country where a Russian bombardment on a medical center left four dead and at least three wounded Friday.
The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed to have destroyed with cruise missiles the largest fuel reserve of the Ukrainian army near kyiv, which was used according to Moscow ‘to supply units in the central part of the country’.
The battle intensifies on the capital’s front where Ukrainian rocket launchers respond to Russian artillery. The Ukrainian army also claims that in the Sea of Azov, the Russian ship ‘Saratov’, intended for a ‘landing’ operation, ‘was destroyed during the attack on the occupied port of Berdiansk’. Two other Russian landing craft, the ‘Caesar Kunikov’ and the ‘Novocherkassk’, were also ‘damaged’, according to kyiv. A curfew has also been decreed in Zaporizhie, in the east of the country.
In a month of war, thousands of Ukrainians have been killed, including 121 children, 6.5 million have had to leave their homes, and more than 4,300 of them have been destroyed, according to a latest assessment by President Zelensky.
Refugees and American soldiers
Joe Biden is expected in the Polish city of Rzeszow, regarding 80 kilometers from the border with Ukraine, the second leg of his trip to Europe. Arriving from Brussels, he will be received by Polish President Andrzej Duda at the airport of this city located two and a half hours by road from Lviv, the main city in western Ukraine, where refugees are flocking.
He will then receive a briefing on “the humanitarian response in order to alleviate the suffering of civilians in Ukraine and to respond to the increasing flow of refugees fleeing the war that (Vladimir) Putin has chosen”, specified the White House.
Diplomatic Marathon
Joe Biden will meet American soldiers positioned in this region, part of the more than 100,000 American soldiers currently present in Europe.
These two days of visit to Poland come following an extraordinary diplomatic marathon in Brussels, where Joe Biden multiplied the summits – NATO, G7, EU – to praise Western unity in its response to Russia, a month to the day following the start of its invasion of Ukraine.
On Friday, the United States and the European Union announced the creation of a working group aimed at reducing Europe’s dependence on Russian fossil fuels. In this context, the United States will strive to supply Europe with an additional 15 billion cubic meters of liquefied natural gas (LNG) this year, according to the press release.
At the same time, Germany, which before the Russian invasion imported a third of its oil and some 45% of its coal from Russia, announced that it would do without Russian coal by the fall and would drastically reduce its dependence on Russian oil by the end of the year.
Joe Biden promised Brussels for the first time on Thursday a NATO “response” in the conflict in Ukraine if Russia resorted to chemical weapons there. In this situation, Westerners found the risk of a chemical attack very credible, once morest which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned them on Thursday. Russia denied any violation of international law on Friday.
/ ATS
