by Maksym Levin
BORODYANKA, Ukraine (Reuters) – The Russian military’s invasion of Ukraine entered its second week on Thursday, with no sign of dramatic progress so far, with the main Russian columns remaining pinned down north of Kiev and at the gates of main other big cities attacked.
The blitz towards the Ukrainian capital and Kharkiv, the country’s second city, located only 30 km from the Russian border, having failed, a war of attrition began, the Russian forces working to encircle the towns, bombing them and depriving them of water and electricity to force the inhabitants to flee.
More than a million Ukrainians have already left their country, according to the United Nations refugee agency, most of them heading for Poland. The conflict also caused hundreds of deaths among the civilian population, the Ukrainian forces but also the Russian army – nearly 500 Russian soldiers were killed according to Moscow, nearly 9,000 according to Kiev.
Only one major Ukrainian city has fallen so far, Kherson, a port at the mouth of the Dnipro River on the Black Sea. Russian tanks from the Crimea region, annexed by Moscow in 2014, entered it on Wednesday and took control on Thursday, according to both sides.
The situation is also critical in Mariupol, another port city caught between Russian forces from Crimea and the pro-Russian secessionist territories of neighboring Donbass. Surrounded, the city is subject to a deluge of fire, according to local authorities. Comparing the situation to the siege of Leningrad by the Nazis during World War II, the mayor denounced an attempt at “genocide” by the Ukrainian people.
Like the cities of Kharkiv and Chernihiv, also shelled, Mariupol was however still controlled Thursday by the Ukrainian army.
At the same time, the huge column of Russian armor spotted several days ago north of Kiev remains more or less at a standstill, about thirty kilometers from the capital, the British Ministry of Defense said on Thursday.
“WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE”, SAYS ZELENSKI
Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky, who is still in Kiev, from where he regularly sends video messages to his compatriots, assured Thursday morning that the lines of defense erected by the army and civilians who took up arms continued to resist. to the invader, despite heavy shelling. “We have nothing to lose except our freedom,” he said.
Ukrainian forces also repelled a Russian assault in Borodyanka, a small town 60 km northwest of Kiev, where Russian armored carcasses are scattered on a highway and surrounding buildings have been destroyed.
“(The Russians) started firing from their armored vehicles towards the park in front of the Post Office,” a resident hiding in his apartment with his family told Reuters. “Then those bastards started a tank and shot at the supermarket which had already burned down. It caught fire again.”
While Russia is the target of unprecedented economic sanctions which have plunged it into a serious financial crisis, its head of diplomacy, Sergei Lavrov, once again estimated on state television on Thursday that the reaction of Western countries to the invasion of Ukraine was “hysteria” and assured that it would eventually subside.
At the same time, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, declared on the contrary that the Twenty-Seven were preparing a new salvo of sanctions in the event of an escalation of the Russian offensive in Ukraine, and were at the same time studying the means of to pass Russian gas, oil and coal.
Britain also took a new step by announcing on Thursday that it would ban Russian companies from accessing the aviation and space insurance market in London, the world’s largest center for commercial and specialist insurance.
Stating that Russia intended to go “all the way” in Ukraine and that Western countries could not ignore its demands “indefinitely”, Sergei Lavrov announced that Vladimir Putin was talking to Emmanuel Macron again and assured that Moscow was welcoming ” favourably” France’s efforts to reach an agreement.
The Russian minister spoke shortly before the opening of a second session of talks between Russian and Ukrainian representatives in Belarus on a possible ceasefire, the first, which was held on Monday, n having produced no results.
RUSSIA ISOLATED AT THE UN
Belarus, whose territory is used in the Russian offensive against Kiev, in which President Alexander Lukashenko has claimed to participate, is one of the four countries – with Syria, Eritrea and North Korea – which have, alongside Russia, voted Wednesday evening against a resolution of the UN General Assembly condemning the “aggression” of Ukraine.
While the text was adopted by an overwhelming majority, the head of French diplomacy, Jean-Yves Le Drian, announced Thursday morning that Paris was going to submit a new resolution to the United Nations Security Council to demand a ceasefire. immediate fire.
The previous draft resolution was vetoed by Russia and this one is likely to meet the same fate, but diplomats will watch the attitude of the three countries which abstained in the first vote of the 15 members of the Council – China , India and United Arab Emirates.
More symbolically, the International Paralympic Committee reversed its decision not to exclude Russian and Belarusian athletes from the Paralympic Games which open this Friday in Beijing. “The rapidly worsening situation puts us in a position (…) impossible so close to the start of the Games,” he explained.
In Russia, where almost all dissent has been suppressed in recent years, the authorities have banned any criticism of the “special military operation” launched on February 24 by Vladimir Putin and which officially aims to oust the “Nazis” from power in Ukraine, whose president Volodimir Zelenski is Jewish.
For not respecting this prohibition, and while thousands of anti-war protesters have been arrested in recent days in Russia, two of the last independent media, the Dojd television channel and the Echo radio of Moscow, have been banned from broadcasting Thursday, according to the Tass agency.
At the same time, the countries of the European Union implemented the decision of the Twenty-Seven to ban the RT channel and the Sputnik site, considered to be propaganda organs in the service of the Kremlin.
(Reporting by Maksym Levin in Borodyanka, Pavel Polityuk, Natalia Zinets and Aleksandar Vasovic in Ukraine and other Reuters bureaus; Writing by Peter Graff; French version Tangi Salaün, Editing by Blandine Hénault)