KYIV/LVIV, Ukraine (Reuters) – The Russian military continued to shell Ukrainian towns on Thursday but its offensive, now entering its fourth week, is still bereft of major success, as talks continue between the two camps.
In Mariupol, a besieged port in the south-east, the emergency services were trying to find survivors trapped under the rubble of a theater which housed many civilians, targeted the day before, according to the Ukrainian authorities, of a Russian airstrike, what Moscow denies.
“The air-raid shelter held. Now the rubble is being cleared. There are survivors but we don’t yet know the number of casualties,” an adviser to the city’s mayor, Petro, told Reuters by phone. Andrushchenko.
In northern Ukraine, Chernihiv, the city’s governor, Vyacheslav Tchaus, said 53 civilians had been killed in the past 24 hours during intense shelling, an unverifiable toll from an independent source.
In Kyiv, the capital, a building suffered heavy damage in the Darnitsky district, due according to the local authorities to the debris of a missile shot down in the early hours of the day.
While residents were busy cleaning up the mess, a kneeling man cried next to the body of a woman covered in a bloody sheet.
Talks between Moscow and Kyiv began Monday via video link and were to resume Thursday for the fourth consecutive day.
Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said the Russian delegation was expending “colossal” energy in these discussions and showed more will than the opposing side. However, he denied that both sides had made any significant progress towards a draft peace agreement.
An adviser to President Volodimir Zelensky, Okelsiy Arestovitch, said the Ukrainian head of state was still demanding recognition of the borders inherited when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991.
ZELENSKY OVATIONN BY THE BUNDESTAG
During his Moscow press briefing, Dmitry Peskov also rejected the decision of the International Court of Justice requiring Russia to cease its offensive and again deemed unacceptable the comments of US President Joe Biden calling Vladimir Putin a war criminal. .
The Russian president showed no signs of slowing down during a television intervention on Wednesday, saying that the “special military operation” launched on February 24 was going as planned and promising that Russia would “purify” itself by distinguishing “the true patriots of traitors”.
“In these difficult times (…), many people show their true colors,” said Dmitry Peskov on Thursday, alluding to these statements. “Some leave their jobs, their working lives, some leave the country. That’s how the cleanup happens.”
Russia says its “operation” in Ukraine aims to militarize and “denazify” the country, which Vladimir Putin presents as an artificial state. Kyiv and its Western allies accuse Moscow of wanting to submit its neighbor and impose a government on it.
In a short speech given by video link before the German Bundestag, which received a standing ovation, Volodimir Zelensky referred to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to urge Chancellor Olaf Scholz to “destroy” the new wall separating, according to him, “freedom of servitude” in Europe.
The Ukrainian president, who is Jewish, also referred to the Holocaust, adding: “In Europe today, a people is being destroyed.”
Vladimir Putin, for his part, compared on Wednesday the economic and diplomatic sanctions, of unprecedented magnitude, imposed on Russia since the start of the war, with the pogroms against the Jews in Germany in the 1930s.
Russia invaded Ukraine from four axes: northeast and northwest towards Kyiv, east via Kharkiv, the country’s second largest city, and south via Crime, annexed by Moscow in 2014.
In a note released Thursday, the British intelligence services ensure that the invasion operation is “largely blocked on all fronts”, the Russian forces suffering heavy losses in the face of determined and well-coordinated Ukrainian resistance.
The war has cost the lives of hundreds of civilians according to the United Nations and has already made more than 3 million refugees.
(Reuters editorials, French version Jean-Stphane Brosse)
by James Mackenzie, Natalia Zinets and Oleksandr Kozhukhar