LUkrainian authorities are planning new evacuations of residents of Mariupol on Monday, after a first operation which removed around 100 civilians from the Azovstal factory, besieged by Russian forces in this strategic port in southeastern Ukraine. According to the Russian ministry, “those who wanted to leave for areas controlled by the kyiv regime were handed over to UN representatives”. “On May 2, the evacuation in Mariupol begins at 7 a.m. (4 a.m. GMT). Collection point-Port City shopping center”, announced on Telegram Pavlo Kirilenko, regional governor of Donetsk, on the night of Sunday to Monday.
“Today, for the first time since the start of the war, this vital humanitarian corridor has started to function. For the first time, there have been two days of real ceasefire in this territory,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video broadcast message on Sunday evening. “More than a hundred civilians have already been evacuated, first of all women and children,” the president said, adding that the first evacuees would arrive in Zaporizhia, a town west of Mariupol, on Monday morning. Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk, however, recalled that “hundreds of civilians remain stranded in Azovstal”.
Their final destination must be Zaporijia, a large Ukrainian city located 200 km west of Mariupol, where they will be welcomed tomorrow. According to the Russian press agencies, the civilians evacuated from this gigantic steel complex, where the last Ukrainian fighters are entrenched against the Russian army which has besieged Mariupol since the beginning of March, have been installed in a camp of tents in Bezimennoye, a city under Russian control east of Mariupol. The Defense Ministry released video of Sunday’s evacuations showing civilians arriving by bus in Bezimennoye, where they were being picked up by ICRC and UN officials as Russian soldiers looked on.
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Multiple failed attempts
Since the beginning of the war, on February 24, thousands of civilians have been able to leave Mariupol, a port city populated before the war by half a million inhabitants. This strategic city is now under Russian control, after weeks of bombardment which almost completely destroyed it. This is the first time, after multiple failed attempts, that civilians entrenched in the Azovstal complex, the last pocket of Ukrainian resistance crushed by Russian bombs, can get out.
Also in eastern Ukraine, four civilians were killed and seven injured on Sunday in shelling on Lyman, a town near the front line and under threat of a Russian assault. The Ukrainian army recently had to withdraw in the face of advancing Russian troops to reposition itself on the outskirts. One civilian died of wounds in Bakhmout, a town further from the front, and four injured in various locations in eastern Ukraine. Three civilians are also reported dead and eight injured in strikes that hit residential areas of Kharkiv and towns in its region.
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In the rest of Donbass, the Russian forces continue their offensive, with particularly intense fighting around Izium, Lyman and Rubizhne, which the Russians are trying to “take control to prepare their attack on Severodonetsk”, one of the major cities of Donbass still controlled by kyiv, the Ukrainian general staff said on Monday. With the approach of May 9, the date when Russia commemorates with great fanfare the victory over Nazi Germany in 1945, the governor of the Lugansk region said he expected “an intensification of the bombardments”.
Sergei Lavrov causes an uproar
But to those who predicted particular military action as May 9 approached, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov seemed to dismiss the matter. “Our military will not artificially adjust their actions to any date, including Victory Day,” Sergei Lavrov said in an interview with Italian TV channel Mediaset broadcast on Sunday. Asked about Russian claims that the war is aimed at “denazifying” Ukraine when President Zelensky is Jewish, the minister sparked an uproar by saying: “I could be wrong, but Hitler also had Jewish blood. »
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His Israeli counterpart Yair Lapid judged these remarks “scandalous, unforgivable, and a horrible historical error”, and summoned the Russian ambassador for “clarifications”. In the south of the country, the Russians are also trying to expand the region they control around Kherson: in this coastal city, the only major Ukrainian city of which Moscow has claimed total control so far, the Russians were to introduce the ruble this weekend, to phase out the use of Ukrainian hryvnia currency.
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kyiv, which denounced “an act of annexation”, also accuses Moscow of wanting to organize a “referendum” soon aimed at proclaiming the independence of this region, as was done by the pro-Russian separatists of Donbass in 2014. Ukrainian army also claimed to have destroyed with Bayraktar drones two Russian patrol boats of the Raptor type near Serpents’ Island, in the Black Sea. The island has become a symbol of Ukrainian resistance since the beginning of the invasion by Moscow forces on February 24. These patrol boats, which can carry around twenty people, are among the fastest shuttles in the Russian Navy.
New sanctions to come against Russia
The Westerners, who have accelerated their deliveries of heavy weapons to help Ukraine resist the Russian offensive, are working on their side to further toughen their economic sanctions against Moscow. In particular, the European Union is finalizing a gradual cessation of its purchases of oil and petroleum products from Russia. The energy ministers of the 27 – 30% of whose oil imports come from Russia – were to meet on Monday afternoon in Brussels to fine-tune a timetable.
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A contract with the Russian group Rosatom to build a nuclear reactor in northern Finland has also been canceled due to the additional “risks” linked to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Finnish-majority consortium said on Monday. the project. Estimated at more than 7.5 billion euros, this 1,200 megawatt reactor project, located in Pyhajöki, dates back to 2010 and had already suffered from numerous delays and uncertainties.
The Europeans also hope to plead for aid to Ukraine with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who begins a three-day tour of Europe in Germany on Monday. India is seeking a difficult balance between its relations with the West and those with Russia, one of its major arms and energy suppliers. She refrained from openly condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and from joining in the votes to that effect at the United Nations. In almost 10 weeks of war, more than 5.4 million Ukrainians have left their country, according to the UN, and more than 7.7 million have left their homes, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). ).
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But no reliable report is available, particularly on the side of military losses: Russia had indicated on March 25 that 1,351 Russian soldiers had died and 3,825 wounded in the conflict, a report not updated since and underestimated according to Westerners. President Zelensky had told him on April 16 that between 2,500 and 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died, and around ten thousand had been injured.