Russian forces entered Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, on Sunday and began a battle in its streets after a night of intense fighting. In Kiev, pressure continues with shelling, but there are no signs of a full-scale offensive against the center of the capital.
The fourth day of Vladimir Putin’s campaign against Ukraine also registered a diplomatic movement, after the West raised the level of punishment to Moscow by announcing the beginning of the disconnection of some Russian banks from the international financial transfer system.
Late in the morning (dawn in Brazil), the Kremlin announced that a delegation had been sent to Gomel, a town in Belarus 40 km from the Ukrainian border. “We will be ready to start negotiations,” said Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
For now, Volodymyr Zelensky’s government rejects the initiative, presumably because what Moscow wants is surrender. In a speech, the president said that it would be possible to talk in Belarus if the Russians had not used the Allied dictatorship as one of the bases for their attack — precisely against Kiev, less than 200 km from the southern Belarusian border.
The Ukrainian enjoyed a successful Saturday in the West, putting his past as a comedian and unskilled politician in power behind as he delivered defiant speeches in Kiev.
Peskov did not elaborate on what the delegation will demand. When he spoke on the subject, on Friday (25), he had mentioned that the idea was to negotiate “the neutrality of Ukraine”. This is the main point of the demands made to the West by his boss, as he gathered almost 200,000 soldiers around the neighbor: to prevent Kiev from joining NATO (Western military alliance) and, by extension, the European Union.
Putin, meanwhile, appeared briefly for the first time in two days, in a televised address on Special Forces Day. “I pay special tribute to those who are heroically performing their military duties during the special operation to assist the people’s republics of Donbass,” he said.
The euphemism for war has become mandatory for the Russian media, now banned from talking about invasion or aggression. He refers to the “casus belli” arranged by Putin to, in his words, demilitarize and denazify Ukraine: the recognition as countries of two areas controlled by pro-Russian rebels since 2014 in the Donbass (east of the country), which they called for an ongoing act. military aid to Moscow.
It came, as months of preparation eventually proved, in the form of an invasion of various parts of Ukraine. Kiev is surrounded by two points, northwest and northeast, but the Russians have not taken action.
“They may be suffering from the Ukrainian resistance, but this opening of the surrender channel seems to tell another story. installation of a pro-Kremlin government”, says political scientist Konstantin Frolov.
This is where the eventual fall of Kharkiv comes in. On Saturday night, there was a large movement of armored vehicles, tanks and self-transported howitzers across the border in the Belgorod region, foreshadowing a siege and invasion. A gas pipeline in the region was blown up, but there is still no assessment of the impact of the attack.
“We are resisting the enemy,” said the Facebook account of the local town hall.
If Kharkiv and its 1.4 million people are in Russian hands, it could facilitate the strengthening of operations in Kiev to the west and cut a key line between Ukrainian forces operating on the former borders of the so-called line of contact, which separated from the Donbass rebels.
At the same time, the Russians took cities around Kherson, a city about 500 km south of Kharkiv. If they conquer it, they could “close” a line across the country, squeezing Ukrainian forces between it and Donbass.
In the separatist areas, the Ukrainians maintain their bombing campaign. That night, they hit another fuel depot in the town of Rovenki. Russian TV also showed images of various damages in residential areas of the locality, although there are no reports of casualties.
It’s part of the propaganda war, of course, but civil suffering, however manipulable, is suffering. On the Ukrainian side, in addition to the trauma of the days under fire and a still uncertain number, in the hundreds, of dead, there is the issue of refugees. According to the UN, there are already 150,000 people who have left the country, most of them for Poland.
In the capital, the dawn was of attacks around the city. A large oil deposit at an air base in Vasilkiv, southeast of Kiev, hit, painting the night sky orange in the distance. A curfew is in place in the city, whose defense of central areas appears to be handed over to militias and civilians, releasing military personnel to the front lines.
The problem is that there is apparent lack of coordination, and there are reports of civilians being shot by others, thinking they are Russians. In the city of Dnipro, Danish reporters were shot because they did not speak Ukrainian when approached.
