On the eve of completing a month of war in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a speech on Tuesday night (22) that peace talks with Russia are advancing at a slow pace.
The invasion ordered by Vladimir Putin caused approximately a quarter of the Ukrainian population to leave their homes. Despite the tension that transcends Eastern Europe, analysts estimate that Russian forces have suffered significant losses and are paralyzed for at least a week on most fronts due to supply problems and Ukrainian resistance.
Moscow’s “special military operation” has failed to capture any of the major Ukrainian cities, but has intensified pressure on strategic points such as Mariupol. The port region is under Russian siege and is experiencing a serious humanitarian crisis.
The President of the United States, Joe Biden, travels to Europe this Wednesday (23). It is the Democrat’s first trip abroad since the beginning of the war, and it is expected that it will lead to new measures to increase retaliation against Moscow.
Biden will meet with leaders from Europe and NATO, the western military alliance, in Brussels, Belgium. The American must also go to Poland, a country that borders Ukraine and to which most of the refugees went — 2.1 million of the total of 3.6 million counted by the United Nations.
A more immediate result of Biden’s articulation with his allies in Europe is expected on Thursday (24) with the announcement of a new round of sanctions against Russia. According to US media, the US retaliation package should include measures against Russian lawmakers.
Ukraine’s expectation is that Putin, who failed to subdue his neighbor as quickly as he had hoped, will now be forced to retreat to negotiate a ceasefire and the withdrawal of Russian troops.
“It’s very difficult, sometimes conflicting, but step by step we are moving forward,” Zelenski said.
The UN Secretary-General, the Portuguese António Guterres, also said he recognized progress “appearing on several key issues”. Without detailing what these advances would be, he said they are enough to end the period of hostilities. The United Nations, however, says it sees no signs that Russia is ready to commit to ending the conflict.
Moscow gave more examples of this, in rhetoric and in practice. In an interview with CNN, the main Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, refused to rule out the possibility of using nuclear weapons. According to him, this is a resource that Russia could use in the event of an “existential threat” — which is understood as a reference to the expansion of NATO in neighboring nations. The guarantee that Ukraine will not join the organization is on Putin’s list of demands for an end to the war.
In practice, Russia intensified the siege of Mariupol. Taking the city would be strategic for Moscow’s interests, as it could become a bridge between Crimea, annexed in 2014, and breakaway territories in the east. Earlier in the week, Russian forces issued an ultimatum for the city to surrender. The proposal was rejected by the Ukrainian authorities.
Satellite images from the American company Maxar show the massive destruction of what was once a city of more than 400,000 people, with plumes of smoke rising from burning residential buildings. Despite Mariupol occupying a central position in the unfolding of the conflict, information on the local scenario is still imprecise, as the press has been prevented from reporting freely.
In a daily update from its intelligence services, the UK Ministry of Defense said the entire battlefield in northern Ukraine – which includes massive armored columns that attacked Kiev previously – was now “static”, with invaders apparently trying to rearrange.
Also according to the British ministry, the Russians are trying to link troops in Mariupol to those near Kharkiv in the hope of encircling Ukrainian forces, while in the southwest of the country the attempt is to bypass the city of Mikolaiv to try to advance on Odessa, the largest port of Ukraine.
There were also, according to local authorities, sporadic bombings in other cities overnight, with two civilians killed in the Mikolaiv region, a bridge destroyed in the Chernihiv region and residential buildings and a shopping mall hit in two districts of Kiev, injuring at least four people. .
