LVIV | Vladimir Putin on Monday honored a brigade that Ukraine accused of participating in Boutcha’s abuses, while his army shelled targets in several areas, including an arms depot near Lviv in the west, and that it was progressing in the east of the country.
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According to the Ukrainian authorities, Russian strikes in particular killed at least eight people in the East and seven in the Lviv region, where Russia claims to have destroyed “large batches of foreign armaments” just delivered to Ukraine . The European Union (EU) has it “condemned the continuation of the bombardments” once morest “civilians”.
In addition, Russian public television showed two Britons captured in Ukraine asking to be exchanged for a wealthy Ukrainian businessman close to the Kremlin, Viktor Medvedchuk.
The Russian president on Monday awarded an honorary title, in particular for his “heroism”, his “tenacity” and his “great professionalism”, to the 64th motorized rifle brigade.
However, Ukraine claimed that the Russian forces and in particular this unit had committed a massacre of civilians in Boutcha, on the outskirts of Kyiv.
The discovery in the streets of this locality of corpses of civilians, shortly following the withdrawal of Russian soldiers, had sparked a wave of international indignation in early April. Ukrainian investigators are still working there to gather elements of “war crimes”.
Russia, for its part, assured that the Ukrainian authorities and the Western media had staged the massacre.
Still in Russia, public television (VGTRK) broadcast a video on Monday showing two Britons, Shaun Pinner and Aiden Aslin, taken prisoner in the fighting in Ukraine.
With drawn features, they turn to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whom they expect to negotiate their release once morest that of Viktor Medvedchuk, recently arrested in Ukraine.
Kyiv for its part broadcast a video of this businessman, in which he says he wants to be exchanged “ once morest the defenders of Mariupol and its inhabitants”.
According to his family, Shaun Pinner is “neither a volunteer nor a mercenary, but officially serves in the Ukrainian army”. After having been in the British army, he had settled in Ukraine where he had married a Ukrainian woman.
On the ground, Russian forces carried out strikes in several regions of Ukraine.
Foreign arms depot ‘destroyed’
In the northeast, the major city of Kharkiv was bombed once more on Monday. Result: at least three dead.
According to the regional prosecutor’s office, a shell fell at the end of the morning on a children’s playground in a residential area, resulting in the death of a man and a woman and damaging buildings.
Already on Sunday, at least five people had died there in a series of Russian strikes.
In the west, in Lviv, seven people were killed on Monday and “eleven injured, including a child”, according to local authorities.
The regional governor, Maksym Kozitsky, mentioned four cruise missile launches from the Caspian Sea: three on military installations and one on a garage, which caused fires.
About four kilometers from the city center, AFP journalists saw the garage on fire, with carcasses of cars in a crater near a railway line.
The EU “condemned the continued indiscriminate and unlawful bombing of civilians and civilian infrastructure” by Moscow. “There can be no impunity for war crimes,” said the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell.
But the Russian army claimed to have “destroyed” near Lviv a large depot “of foreign armaments, delivered to Ukraine during the last six days by the United States and European countries, which were stored there”. In total, it even claims to have destroyed in the single day of Monday 16 Ukrainian military sites, in particular ammunition and Totchka-U tactical missiles.
These armaments constitute a major stake, both for Moscow and for Kyiv.
Support for Ukraine, the United States announced on this subject on Monday that the first shipments of its new tranche of military aid (800 million dollars) had just arrived the day before at the country’s borders to be handed over to the Ukrainian army.
Located far from the front, near the Polish border, the large city of Lviv has become a city of refuge for displaced people and had hitherto been little targeted by Russian strikes, unlike eastern Ukraine where now concentrates most of the fighting.
“Destroy the Donbass”
In a video message on Sunday evening, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed that Russian soldiers were preparing for “an offensive in the east of our country in the near future. They literally want to complete and destroy the Donbass”.
“Just as the Russian military is destroying Mariupol, they want to destroy other cities and other communities in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions”, he continued, before launching: “we are doing everything to ensure the defense “.
Russia is determined to seize Mariupol, whose last defenders on Sunday ignored a Russian military ultimatum to lay down their arms.
“No, the city did not fall. Our soldiers are still there. They will fight until the end,” said Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Chmygal.
The capture of this port city would be an important victory for the Russians because it would allow them to consolidate their coastal territorial gains along the Sea of Azov by linking the Donbass region, partly controlled by their supporters, to the Crimea that Moscow annexed in 2014.
According to World Food Program Director-General David Beasley, more than 100,000 civilians are on the brink of starvation in Mariupol, also lacking water and heating.
“This week is going to be difficult”
The Russian forces also continued their progress in other territories in eastern Ukraine, such as Kreminna where they entered on Monday, following “a major attack during the night”, announced the governor of the Lugansk region. , Serguiï Gaïdaï.
“The Russian army has already entered it, with a huge amount of war material”, he declared, then acknowledging at the end of the day that the city was “unfortunately under the control of orcs”, a pejorative nickname given to the Russian forces.
Kreminna, which has regarding 18,000 inhabitants, is regarding fifty kilometers northeast of Kramatorsk, the Ukrainian capital of Donbass.
At least four civilians were killed in Russian shelling as they tried to flee Kreminna, Gaidai said. And four others also died on Monday from Russian strikes in the neighboring region of Donetsk, according to his counterpart Pavlo Kyrylenko.
Shortly before, Serguiï Gaïdaï had urged civilians to evacuate the Lugansk region.
“This week is going to be difficult,” he warned. Now “this may be the last time we have a chance to save you” by leaving combat zones, he said.
But Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said no humanitarian corridors for the evacuation of civilians would be set up on Monday, for the second day in a row, because “the Russian occupiers keep blocking them and shelling them “.
On the diplomatic front, President Zelensky said on Monday that he hoped to obtain for his country “in the coming weeks” the status of candidate for EU membership.
Obtaining this status “takes years” but Brussels “really gave us the opportunity to start this procedure within a few weeks or months”, he underlined.
For its part, the United States will boycott certain G20 Finance meetings scheduled for Wednesday if Russia participates, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned.
And Washington intends, with its allies, to soon adopt new economic sanctions once morest Russia, in particular to “disrupt its military-industrial complex and its supply chains”.
