From Kyiv
During the last few hours, tension has skyrocketed in eastern Ukraine. According to the observers of the OSCE, the organization that is in charge of monitoring the situation in the area, more than 1,500 violations of the ceasefire and 1,200 explosions have been registered in a single day.
The war in eastern Ukraine has been going on for 8 years now. Why is this situation a novelty?
Indeed, as we explained in the previous notethe war in the Donbass (the geographical region that includes Donetsk and Luhansk) is regarding to turn 8 years old.
The difference is that now Ukraine has become the center of world geopolitical attention. What was until now a “forgotten war” might become the trigger for a large-scale conflict.
The pro-independence governments of Donetsk and Luhansk order the evacuation of women and children
Denis Pushilin, the leader of the so-called ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ (abbreviated as “DNR “ by his Russian initials) announced on Thursday that he was beginning the evacuation to Russia of women and children living in the area under his control and the general mobilization of men to take up arms.
Shortly following the DNR statement, the ‘”Luhansk People’s Republic'” (“LNR”) issued similar orders.
The Ukrainian government denies that it is preparing an attack on Donetsk and Luhansk
Dmytro Kuleba, the Ukrainian Foreign Minister, responded on Twitter that his government is not planning a large-scale attack on Donbass. Kuleba denounced the moves by pro-independence leaders as an “excuse” being manufactured by the Kremlin to justify a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Western diplomacy meets in Munich
The Foreign Ministers of the G7 (group made up of the USA, UK, Germany, Canada, France, Italy and Japan) met this Saturday at the CMunich Security Conference, an event that has been held every year since 1963 and has become the main forum for discussing defense matters.
Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, was also invited to the meeting and in his speech he called for “protection guarantees” to the Western powers, recalling that in 1994 Ukraine renounced the nuclear arsenal it possessed as a former Soviet republic in exchange for the international community guaranteeing its sovereignty.
NATO withdraws its personnel from Kiev
Citing “security reasons”, NATO announced that it was withdrawing all its personnel from Kiev. This decision by the Atlantic Alliance joins those of more than 30 governments that also closed their embassies in the Ukrainian capital.
In addition, the German airline Lufthansa issued a statement explaining that all its flights to Kiev and Odessa are suspended as of Monday, February 21.
And in an interview on the BBC on Sunday morning, Boris Johnson warned that we may be facing “the biggest European conflict since 1945”.
*Sent to Ukraine from the Spanish newspaper Publicspecial for Page 12.
