US President Joe Biden travels to Poland on Friday, in a city near the Ukrainian border, on the front line of the Western commitment against the invasion launched by Moscow, which looks more and more like a war of attrition.
In Ukraine, the situation in the city of Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, heavily bombarded, is deteriorating further, the Ukrainians denouncing the “mass” deportation of inhabitants to Russia.
The mayor of Mariupol, Vadim Boychenko, advanced Thursday evening on Telegram a final assessment of 15,000 inhabitants taken “by force” on board buses, as well as “the confiscation of Ukrainian passports” of inhabitants stuck there.
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov says his paramilitary militia, which fights alongside the Russian army, has taken over the town hall of this strategic port city. Information impossible to confirm from an independent source, and the Ukrainian army ensures that Mariupol has not yet fallen.
The offensive continues elsewhere in the country, after deadly strikes on Thursday in Kharkiv, the country’s second city, and in Longansk, and accusations of phosphorus bombs in Rubizhne…
“The occupiers are trying unsuccessfully to reach the borders of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, to encircle the city of kyiv,” the Ukrainian army said overnight from Thursday to Friday.
“There were a lot of shots, they hit my house. The windows, the doors, the ceilings are destroyed”, tells AFP Yaroslava Delichevska, 58, who fled, with the five dogs of the family, her suburb of kyiv, transformed into a theater of fierce fighting.
The battle intensifies on the capital’s front where Ukrainian rocket launchers respond to Russian artillery.
“The enemy will probably try to resume offensive operations in the direction of the towns of Brovary and Boryspil in order to block kyiv from the east,” added the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in its latest bulletin.
The Ukrainian army also claims that in the Sea of Azov, the Russian ship “Saratov”, intended for a “landing” operation, “was destroyed during the attack on the occupied port of Berdiansk”. Two other Russian landing ships, the “Caesar Kunikov” and the “Novocherkassk”, were also “damaged”, according to kyiv.
In his latest video posted on Facebook, overnight from Thursday to Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, entrenched in kyiv, pays tribute to “the heroic opposition of the Ukrainian people in the face of the Russian military invasion”.
In a month of war, thousands of Ukrainians have been killed, including 121 children, 6.5 million have had to leave their homes, and more than 4,300 of them have been destroyed, according to a latest assessment by President Zelensky.
– Refugees and American soldiers –
Joe Biden is expected in the Polish city of Rzeszow, about 80 kilometers from the border with Ukraine, the second leg of his trip to Europe.
Arriving from Brussels, he will be received by Polish President Andrzej Duda at the airport of this city located two and a half hours by road from Lviv, the main city in western Ukraine, where refugees are flocking.
He will then receive a briefing on “the humanitarian response in order to alleviate the suffering of civilians in Ukraine and to respond to the increasing flow of refugees fleeing the war that (Vladimir) Putin has chosen”, specified the White House.
Joe Biden will meet American soldiers positioned in this region, part of the more than 100,000 American soldiers currently present in Europe.
He will then go to Warsaw, where he will deliver a speech “on the united efforts of the free world to support the Ukrainian people” and “hold Russia accountable for its brutal war”, according to the White House.
These two days of visit to Poland come after an extraordinary diplomatic marathon in Brussels, where Joe Biden has multiplied the summits – NATO, G7, EU – to praise Western unity in its response to Russia, a month to the day after the start of its invasion of Ukraine.
– NATO “response” –
Joe Biden promised Thursday in Brussels for the first time a “response” from NATO in the conflict in Ukraine if Russia resorted to chemical weapons there.
In this situation, Westerners found the risk of a chemical attack very credible, against which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned them on Thursday.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also expressed Thursday evening its “concern” after being informed by the Ukrainian authorities of the bombing of the city where the staff of the Chernobyl site live.
On the economic front, the G7 and European Union countries will sanction any transaction involving Russia’s gold reserves, to prevent Moscow from circumventing the financial isolation measures taken by the West.
burx-dth / ybl