The Russian invasion of Ukraine is not aimed at overthrowing Volodymyr Zelensky’s government, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday (9), the day the war completes two weeks.
The speech shows a certain change in tone adopted especially at the beginning of the war, declared in the early hours of February 24 by President Vladimir Putin with the declared aim of “denazifying” Ukraine, amid accusations that the Zelensky administration had associations with neo-Nazi groups. . The Ukrainian president has claimed since the beginning of the conflict that he is “Target Number 1” and that he could be killed at any time.
On Monday, a government spokesman told Reuters news agency conditions for ending the war, which did not include Zelensky’s fall. According to him, the operation aims for Ukraine to surrender militarily; change its Constitution to ensure it will never join NATO (Western military alliance) or the European Union; and recognize Crimea annexed in 2014 as Russian and the breakaway eastern Donbass regions as independent.
Zakharova defended on Wednesday that the war has gone according to plan, contradicting analysts who point out that the Russians have faced a greater difficulty than initially anticipated.
The fourteenth day of the war began with the promise of a new temporary ceasefire to allow civilians to exit through humanitarian corridors. The other truces announced so far have not been respected, leaving hundreds of thousands of people stranded in besieged cities, without access to clean water and medicines.
Russia has pledged to respect a truce from 9 am to 9 pm local time (4 am to 4 pm GMT) on Wednesday. This morning, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk said both sides of the conflict had agreed to respect the ceasefire.
This Wednesday’s truce announcement was similar to that of Tuesday (8), which promised safe escape through the cities of Kiev, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Sumi and Mariupol. So far, however, only one corridor has actually worked, leaving Sumi on Tuesday, as about 5,000 people left the city.
The situation is particularly tense in Mariupol, a southern port city that has been completely surrounded by Russian troops for more than a week, where the Red Cross describes the situation of civilians as “apocalyptic”.
Residents take shelter underground to protect themselves from the constant bombing, without access to food, water, energy or heat, and without being able to evacuate the wounded.
A ceasefire in the region had already failed on Saturday. The Ukrainian government said 30 buses and eight supply trucks were bombed by Russia on Tuesday, in violation of the ceasefire, and failed to reach the region. Moscow blamed Kiev for not stopping the fire.
In Ukraine’s two largest cities, Kiev and Kharkiv, the Russian government’s offer of humanitarian corridors would force civilians to go to Russia itself or its ally Belarus, proposals rejected by the Ukrainian government.
More than 2 million people have fled Ukraine since President Vladimir Putin invaded the country two weeks ago.
The war quickly threw Russia into economic isolation never before seen in an economy of this size. The United States on Wednesday banned imports of Russian oil.
Western companies have also withdrawn from the Russian market, such as Starbucks, Coca-Cola and Pepsi. The most symbolic, however, is McDonald’s, which announced on Tuesday that it was closing its nearly 850 restaurants in the country. The chain’s first Russian store, which drew huge lines to Moscow’s Pushkin Square when it opened in 1990, was an emblem of the end of the Cold War.
