2024-01-22 04:23:00
Volodimir Zelensky, president of Ukraine, opposes handing over the Donbas and Crimea to Russia (EUROPA PRESSARCHIVE)
Volodimir Zelensky stated this Sunday that he will not sign any type of agreement that would entail handing over Crimea and the Donbas to Russia, while reproaching his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, for not really wanting peace.
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Putin “does not want peace with Ukraine,” but rather aspires to occupy the entire country. “He has never wanted peace,” said the Ukrainian president in an interview with British television Channel 4 News.
“If we want to stop it, if the world wants this not to happen once more, this aggression not to happen once more in a few years, the best thing is to take care of it right now,” he said.
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“Peace in Europe is only possible when everyone assumes that Ukraine is truly independent,” he stressed, although he admitted that “it is obviously better to look for a political solution to recover our independence.”
Regarding military and economic aid from the United States and its allies, Zelensky noted that it is crucial for Ukraine’s survival, but not enough to achieve victory. “Everyone smiles, hugs you and says that you are stable, that you are strong, a leader of the free world, that you are saving democracy. If the Ukrainian people did not have such a president we might have lost half of Europe and then the Russian Federation and we must give everything. “Enough!,” he added.
Zelensky warned that Putin “does not want peace” with Ukraine (EUROPA PRESS/ARCHIVE)
Zelensky said he doesn’t want to seem ungrateful following all the help he received: “They have helped us a lot to persevere and I think they might have helped us even a little more to win.”
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However, “time passes and people die” while it is debated whether or not to deliver one or another weapon to Ukraine. “That’s why I feel that this passing time is bloody, very painful. But not everyone understands it. I have been saying it since the first days,” she noted.
Zelensky gave the F-16 fighters as an example. A year has passed since speculation began regarding it and the training lasts six more months. “The F-16s have not arrived yet,” highlighted the Ukrainian president.
For its part, the Russian Army claimed this Sunday to have taken a small town in the Kharkiv region, in eastern Ukraine, although the Kiev forces indicated that it has “no importance” from a military point of view.
The announcement is a sign of the increased pressure in recent weeks on Moscow’s forces on the front.
Last Thursday, Putin’s troops announced the capture of another small town, Veseloye, in the Donetsk region in the east.
“The village of Krakhmalnoye in the Kharkiv region was liberated thanks to active operations successfully carried out by units of the ‘West’ troop group in the Kupyansk area,” the Russian Defense Ministry said in its report. diary of his operations in Ukraine.
Zelensky once more asked the West for more military aid to confront the Russian invasion (Europa Press/Contact/Pool /Ukrainian Presidentia)
This town, where regarding 45 inhabitants lived before February 24, 2022, is located 30 kilometers southeast of Kupyansk, the target of attacks by Russian forces for months.
A spokesman for the Ukrainian ground forces, Volodimir Fitio, said on Ukrainian television on Sunday that this capture “has no strategic importance.”
“There are regarding five houses. They were destroyed by the Russians,” he assured, explaining that the Ukrainian troops had been moved to reserve positions where “they maintain the defense, preventing the enemy from continuing to advance.”
Faced with Russian pressure, Ukrainian authorities this week ordered the evacuation of 26 towns in the Kharkiv region, where Kupyansk is located, a decision that affects regarding 3,000 people, including 279 children.
This entire area was occupied by Russia at the beginning of the offensive ordered in February 2022 by Russian President Vladimir Putin, until a lightning attack by the Ukrainians liberated the region in September of the same year, forcing Moscow’s troops to withdraw.
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