100,000 people still stuck in Mariupol’s “freezing hell”
About 100,000 people are still trapped under Russian bombs in besieged Mariupol, almost a month following the start of the invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces, which control only one major city but are still bombarding several. .
Satellite image of Livoberezhnyi district in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 22, 2022.
AFP
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s proposal to meet with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to find “compromises”, including on the occupied territories of Crimea and Donbass, remained a dead letter on Tuesday, the Russians hoping for a “more energetic” negotiation process. , more substantial”, according to Dmitri Peskov, the spokesman of the Russian presidency.
Pending the possible start of a ceasefire, “nearly 100,000 people in inhuman conditions” are trapped in the ruins of Mariupol, “in a state of total siege, without food, without water, without medicine , under constant bombardment,” warned Volodymyr Zelensky in a video published at dawn on Wednesday.
The Ukrainian president must address the French and Japanese parliaments on Wednesday, as a prelude to a weekend of high diplomatic activity: Thursday, a month to the day following the outbreak of the invasion, Westerners will meet in Brussels for summits NATO, the G7 and the European Union.
The key, “new sanctions once morest Russia”, according to Jake Sullivan, national security adviser to Joe Biden. The American president will then travel to Poland, the country which hosts most of the 3.5 million Ukrainian refugees. Joe Biden, who leaves for Europe on Wednesday, will also “work with the allies on long-term adjustments” concerning NATO’s presence in Eastern Europe, said Jake Sullivan.
“Superpowered Bombs”
Mariupol, a predominantly Russian-speaking port city strategically located between Crimea (south), occupied by Moscow since 2014, and the separatist territory of Donetsk (east), has been bombed for weeks by the Russians. She was targeted Tuesday by two “superpowered bombs”, according to the municipality, which did not give a report. Satellite images taken Tuesday morning by the American company Maxar and distributed to AFP showed the devastation of residential areas, civil infrastructure and factories.
Russian tanks rolled into the city, and a senior Pentagon official said Tuesday evening that Russian strategy now relied on “long-range fire in the center of town,” which the Americans have observed “for the past 24 hours. “.
Residents who fled Mariupol described to the NGO Human Rights Watch “a freezing hell, with streets strewn with corpses and the rubble of destroyed buildings”.
“It’s not war, it’s genocide,” Ukraine’s Attorney General Iryna Venediktova told AFP on Tuesday, because “theaters of war have rules, principles. What we see in Mariupol (is) the complete absence of rules”.
President Zelensky on Tuesday evening denounced the capture by the Russians of a humanitarian convoy. For the supply of food and medicine, “all our attempts, unfortunately, are reduced to nothing by the Russian occupiers. With bombardments or obvious terror,” he lamented.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres spoke out on Tuesday once morest an “absurd” and “unwinnable” war, saying that “even if Mariupol fell, Ukraine might not be conquered city by city, street by street, house by house.
Russian forces continued at the beginning of the week to bombard other Ukrainian cities: kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, Mykolaiv, Cherniguiv…
In kyiv, where the curfew introduced Monday morning is supposed to end this Wednesday morning, the advance of Russian troops seems frozen. And the population, of which a large part of the 3.5 million inhabitants have fled, awaits, anxious but determined, a possible assault by Russian troops. In the west, the north and the east of the capital, not a corner of a street, an alley or a crossroads which is not cut by a wall of sandbags or anti-tank hedgehogs, made of bars of star-crossed metal.
After the strike Sunday evening of a Russian missile on an ultramodern shopping center in kyiv, where according to Moscow were camouflaged ammunition and artillery, the fear concerns spy drones or suicide bombers, like photos on social networks which might reveal the Ukrainian positions.
At least one person died Tuesday in an attack once morest a building of the National Academy of Sciences, in the northwest of the city, AFP noted. A total of 228 people, including 4 children, have been killed in the capital since the start of the invasion.
The bombardments were particularly intense on Tuesday in several localities around the capital and fighting was underway in the suburbs, in Irpin and Gostomel, according to the governor of the region, Oleksandre Pavliuk.
Counteroffensive
In southern Ukraine, where the only major city in the country they control (Kherson) is located, the Russian forces try to advance towards the west and the Black Sea but do not progress around Mykolaiv.
Kharkiv (northeast), the country’s second city, is surrounded by Russian forces on several sides and major axes, but is not surrounded.
The Ukrainians “are now, in certain situations, on the offensive,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told CNN, saying they are “chasing the Russians and pushing them out of areas where the Russians were by the pass”. The latter are experiencing problems with logistics, supplies, coordination, command and communication, he later listed during a press briefing, “so there are a lot of things they have not not successful”.
The Americans thus suggest, mezzo voce, the occurrence of a tipping point in the conflict. A senior Pentagon official said Tuesday evening that, “for the first time”, the Russians had passed “a little below 90% of their available combat power” massed in Belarus and on the Russian-Ukrainian border. However, the New York Times, relying on Pentagon sources, explains that the loss of 10% of an army’s military personnel (dead or wounded) greatly hampers its ability to fight.
According to Washington, Russia has amplified its air and naval operations in the country in recent days in the face of resistance from Ukrainian forces. “What we see is a desperate attempt by the Russians to regain momentum,” noted a senior Pentagon official earlier this week.
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