A family walks through the rubble of the Ukrainian city of Bucha. /
Putin’s spokesman acknowledges that the casualties suffered by his Army represent “an enormous tragedy”
For the first time since the Russian onslaught on Ukraine, on February 24, the Kremlin (apparently) makes a slip, and eludes triumphalism for seconds to unambiguously assume that it is paying a high bill in human lives with its ‘special operation’ . And he does so without hesitation, in an interview with a Western media and through the mouth of one of the men closest to Vladimir Putin, his official spokesman. Dmitry Peskov admitted this Thursday afternoon “significant losses” of Russian troops; deaths that are a “huge tragedy for us”.
A handful of words –with a remarkable background–, chained in the same sentence, in English and in a live conversation with the journalist Mark Austin, of the British chain ‘Skynews’, who had questioned him about the number of Russian casualties. He did not give it, but he did not hesitate to slip that there are many in that start of the answer.
The reality is that neither Moscow nor kyiv have updated them for a long time. According to Ukraine, Russia would have suffered the loss of 18,000 of its soldiers, something that the Kremlin lowers to 1,351. Those figures (along with the 3,825 injured) have not officially changed since March 25. NATO and other international organizations multiply by at least ten the number of Russian soldiers who have lost their lives in their combat against the Ukrainian resistance. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz recently put it at “at least” 10,000.
Peskov added in this speech that the withdrawal movement from kyiv and Chernigov, already consummated according to different sources, was a kind of “act of goodwill” agreed in the different talks for a ceasefire that delegations from Ukraine and Russia have been holding. Nothing new in the message. Nor this: “We deny that the Russian Army could have anything to do with these atrocities and that corpses have been shown in the streets of Bucha.”
Russia denies responsibility for the massacre and continues to describe what happened in the small town of the kyiv region as a “set-up”. Putin’s spokesman, in fact, maintained that “we live in days of falsifications and lies.” And he did it with the same cynicism that other political leaders in the country have been using. The whole situation in Bucha is a “well-staged innuendo, nothing more.”
The Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, was the one who began to support that message, just hours after a reaction of international condemnation broke out that still persists. This Thursday he was also lewd to refer to another front, the diplomat. He believes that kyiv basically does not want to negotiate and takes initiatives to make the talks fail. “A deviation is observed in the most important provisions fixed at the Istanbul meeting” on March 29, Lavrov declared, referring to a new draft presented by Ukraine on Wednesday. In his words, “the draft no longer contains the clause stating that security guarantees will not apply to Crimea and Sevastopol. They also modified the provision on the prohibition of military maneuvers without prior authorization” from the guarantor countries.
THE KEYS:
Figure war.
Western organizations estimate the troops lost by Russia at 10,000, which admits 1,351Sergei Lavrov.
He accuses kyiv of boycotting the negotiations because “it has changed important points” already agreed
In a video published on the website of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Lavrov maintains that, by proposing a new version of the agreement with Russia, kyiv “showed its inability to negotiate, as well as its intention to delay and undermine the course of negotiations. We see that the kyiv regime is controlled by Washington and its allies, which push President Zelensky to continue fighting ».
withdrawal
“Surely at the next stage, the Ukrainian side will ask for the withdrawal of troops and will accumulate more and more preconditions (…) This is unacceptable,” added the head of Russian Diplomacy, who also considers “inadmissible” Ukraine’s claim to let it be the presidents of both countries, Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, who meet to discuss the status of Crimea and Donbas without having previously reached a compromise between the negotiating delegations.
Peskov himself already warned last week that “a meeting between Putin and Zelensky is hypothetically possible, but if there is already a specific document beforehand, not a cluster of diffuse ideas.”
The truth is that, the day after the meeting in Istanbul, the head of the Russian negotiating delegation, Vladimir Medinski, already questioned the viability of the contacts by pointing out that Moscow has not changed its position that Crimea belongs to Russia while the self-proclaimed rebel republics of Donetsk and Lugansk are independent states.
The main Ukrainian negotiator, Mikhailo Podoliak, responded to Lavrov on Thursday, warning that “if Russia wants to show that it is willing to dialogue, it must reduce its hostility.” After the round of talks in Istanbul, it was planned that the negotiations would have continued by videoconference, but this has not been the case. The Bucha massacre has been uncovered in this time. Something that the Turkish Foreign Minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, considers that “overshadowed” the attempts to achieve peace.