Lhe UN Security Council has “failed to prevent and end” the war in Ukraine, its secretary general, Antonio Guterres, said Thursday, April 28, during a press conference in kyiv. “The Security Council has failed to do what was in its power to prevent and end this war,” Guterres said alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, saying it was “a source of great disappointment. , frustration and anger.
The Ukrainian capital was the target of strikes Thursday evening, in full visit of the secretary general of the UN and for the first time since mid-April, noted AFP journalists. AFP correspondents saw on the spot a floor of a building on fire, broken windows, a strong police presence and rescue workers. The mayor of kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, confirmed on Telegram “two strikes” on one of the districts of the capital.
After Russia, Ukraine. Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary General, is on the ground as the Kremlin has been on the offensive for more than two months. The head of the United Nations went to Boutcha, Irpin, then Borodyanka. On the spot, he affirmed that “a war is an absurdity in the XXIand century”, as soon as he arrived in this locality on the outskirts of kyiv where the Ukrainians accuse the Russians of having committed abuses during their occupation of the region in March.
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In addition, the UN Secretary General on Thursday called on Moscow to “agree to cooperate” with the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation into possible war crimes perpetrated in Ukraine, during a visit to Boutcha, a suburb of kyiv that has become a symbol of the atrocities committed since the start of the Russian invasion. “When we see this horrible site, I see how important it is to have a full investigation and to establish accountability,” Mr. Guterres said. “I call on Russia to agree to cooperate with the ICC,” he added.
Antonio Guterres, who is making his first visit to Ukraine since the start of the Russian invasion on February 24, made these statements to journalists in front of ruined houses, accompanied by Ukrainian soldiers and local authority officials. “I imagine my family in one of these houses that are now destroyed and blackened,” he told reporters. “I see my granddaughters running in panic. War is nonsense in the 21st centuryand century, no war is acceptable in the 21stand century,” he added.
Moscow, for its part, does not intend to slow down its progress in the east and south of the country. Quite the contrary. On Wednesday, the European Union accused Russia of “blackmail” after its decision to stop delivering gas to Poland and Bulgaria.
The UN chief arrived in Ukraine from Moscow where he pleaded with Vladimir Putin for a ceasefire “as soon as possible”. But on the ground, the Russian forces are stepping up their offensive, particularly in the region of Kharkiv and Donetsk, in the east of the country, the staff of the Ukrainian forces said Thursday morning.
Ottawa accuses Moscow of ‘genocide’
kyiv accuses the Russian forces of having committed massacres in Boutcha, Irpin and Borodyanka, after the discovery of dozens of corpses wearing civilian clothes in these localities occupied and then abandoned by the Russian army. On April 2, in Boutcha, journalists from Agence France-Presse discovered the horror: a street strewn with corpses. And the UN documented the “murder, including some by summary execution”, of 50 civilians, after a mission in the city.
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On Wednesday, Canadian MPs passed a motion condemning Russia’s “acts of genocide against the Ukrainian people” and saying there is “clear and abundant evidence of systematic and massive war crimes and crimes against humanity.” “. Britain on Wednesday called on Ukraine’s allies to show “courage” in increasing their military aid, arguing that the war in Ukraine was “our war” and victory in kyiv a “strategic imperative for all of us”. . “Heavy weapons, tanks, planes – dig into our stocks, ramp up production, we have to do all that,” British Foreign Minister Liz Truss said in a speech in London on Wednesday evening.
Putin’s stern warning against any act of interference
The Russian president, for his part, again warned against any external intervention in the conflict in Ukraine, promising a “rapid and lightning” response. Moscow is trying to target this military aid in the meantime, and the Russian Defense Ministry said on Wednesday that “sheds with a large quantity of foreign weapons and ammunition, delivered to Ukrainian forces by the United States and European countries , had been destroyed with Kalibr missiles fired from the sea at the Zaporizhia aluminum plant” in southern Ukraine.
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The governor of this region, however, provided a firm denial: “No ammunition and arms depot was affected in Zaporizhia”, he retorted, hammering that the affected factory “had not been operational since six years “. Russian troops are also bombing bridges and railways to slow down Western arms deliveries to Ukraine, an adviser to the Ukrainian Interior Minister said on Tuesday after the destruction of a strategic bridge linking this country to Romania.
Russian strikes on 59 Ukrainian targets
Russian forces, which have been stepping up their offensive in Donbass for two weeks, announced on Wednesday that they had carried out airstrikes on 59 Ukrainian targets. At the same time, the Ukrainian army has, rare on its part, recognized Russian advances in the East, in the Kharkiv region and in the Donbass, a mining basin partly controlled by pro-Russian separatists since 2014.
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kyiv admitted that the Russians had taken localities stretching from north to south, suggesting that Moscow wants to take a vice in a large pocket still in the hands of the Ukrainians. “We have extremely difficult weeks ahead,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said in a statement on Wednesday.
According to him, the Russian army, “already aware of its strategic defeat, will try to inflict as much suffering as possible” on the Ukrainian soldiers, whom he urged to “hold on”. In Kherson (South), the first major city seized by Russian forces after their invasion of Ukraine launched on February 24, “the occupants threw tear gas canisters at Ukrainian demonstrators who were chanting “Kherson is Ukraine! said the Ukrainian army in a statement. Demonstrators “were injured and arrested”, added the same source.
Mariupol still under Russian fire
In Kharkiv, whose northern and eastern districts are less than 5 kilometers from the front line, at least three people died and 15 were injured in shelling, Governor Oleg Synegoubov said. At the southern tip of Donbass, in the strategic port city of Mariupol, besieged and devastated, “the enemy is massively bombarding and blocking our units near the Azovstal factory”, said the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. in his daily report.
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The commander of the 36and Mariupol Marine Brigade Sergei Volyna appealed for help again, saying he had 600 wounded soldiers and hundreds of civilians with him. “My message today is: save the Mariupol garrison, carry out an exfiltration operation for us. People will just die here […]civilians die with us […]the city is almost erased from the surface of the Earth, ”he implored in a message relayed on Telegram.
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According to Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovich, “the efforts of the Russian invaders are concentrated around Slovyansk, Kramatorsk and Mariupol” where they are trying to dislodge the Ukrainian soldiers barricaded in the Azovstal metallurgical complex and where there are also hundreds of civilians. Efforts are being made, he said, to “force Vladimir Putin to release them”. “Civilians first, but we are also working to evacuate our soldiers,” he said.
Upcoming meeting of EU energy ministers
On the economic ground, the Russian group Gazprom announced on Wednesday that it had suspended all its gas deliveries to Bulgaria and Poland, ensuring that these two countries had not paid in rubles, as Vladimir Putin has demanded since March. The President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen denounced “gas blackmail” and affirmed that these two member countries of the EU and NATO, very dependent on Russian gas, were now supplied “by their neighbors in the ‘European Union “.
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The European Ministers in charge of Energy will meet on Monday May 2 in an “extraordinary session”, announced Wednesday evening the French Minister in charge of Ecological Transition, Barbara Pompili. These events come at a time when many chancelleries are worried about the risk of spreading the conflict, after a series of explosions, attributed by kyiv to Moscow, in the pro-Russian separatist region of Transnistria, in Moldova.
On Wednesday, authorities in the separatist territory said a border village hosting a major Russian army ammunition depot had come under fire from Ukraine. To help Ukraine, the European Commission proposed on Wednesday to suspend all customs duties on products imported from this country into the EU for one year. The proposal still needs to be approved by the European Parliament and the 27 member states.