Ukraine loses control of the Sea of ​​Azov

by time news

The war does not recede in Ukraine. Upside down. On the twenty-fourth day of the start of the invasion of Russia, Ukrainian forces “temporarily” lost control of the Sea of ​​Azov, near the martyred city of Mariupol, in southern Ukraine, in what seems more and more an attempt by Russia to connect at all costs its territory with the Crimean peninsula. The new outcome, which comes after days in which the area has been subjected to one of the fiercest attacks by the Russian army, was reported on Saturday morning in the evening bulletin of the Ukrainian General Staff.

Precisely in Mariúpolaccording to the mayor of the city, Vadym Buychenko, almost 80% of the buildings in the city already show signs of war, or they have been directly destroyed —a third of which would be irreparable—, and the city has been left without water, gas and electricity. “There are shots and fights in the center of the city,” Buychenko denounced, thus confirming the previous day’s announcement by Russian forces that they were tightening the siege on Mariupol. “We are tightening the rope,” they said. All this, with civilians trapped in the city, since only some 30,000 people have been evacuated, and even the Red Cross has abandoned the city, unable to guarantee the safety of its workers.

urban guerrilla

In these circumstances, Buychenko also reported that they continue to have difficulties rescuing the last civilians who were in a bunker of the city’s Drama Theater, after more than 48 hours trapped in the rubble since the bombing. The reason is that, in the city, the situation is not only urban guerrilla, but Russian forces are using their deadliest weaponry, the politician has said. “There are tanks, artillery shelling, and all kinds of weapons are being fired in the area,” Buychenko said, confirming that, right now, Ukrainian forces are “unfortunately” less numerous than those of their adversaries in the contest.

Even so, Russian forces continue to deny that they are targeting civilians, and even they deny bombing the Drama Theater which, according to his version, was attacked by the Ukrainians as a “bloody provocation”. In parallel, Moscow also claimed to have used high-precision Kinjal missiles for the first time to destroy Ukrainian military infrastructure in Ivano-Frankivsk, in western Ukraine, in recent days, something unprecedented, according to the Russian news agency Tass and collected AFP.

The intensification of the Russian offensive on Mariupol also coincided with the certification of the destruction of the Azovstal metallurgical plant in the city, one of the largest in Europe, according to the Minister of the Interior of Ukraine, Vadym Denysenko. “According to our information, we have lost an economic giant. (…) The goal of (Russian President Vladimir) Putin is not to demilitarize Ukraine but to de-industrialize it and that we will have to rebuild our plants in the coming decades,” Denysenko said.

While the Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops continued to block various accesses to the cities of Cherníguiv and Sumy, in the north of the country, and to Kharkov, and Severodonetsk, in the east, the authorities called for caution due to the presence of mines. At least 7 people lost their lives in Makariv, in the kyiv district, and their bodies were transferred to morgues in nearby areas.

A humanitarian drama, this, to which other concerns are also added, including that of the children who are suffering from the conflict. According to UNICEF, there is a real risk that minors fall into human trafficking and exploitation networks. It is a “real and growing” danger, the humanitarian agency said.

Russian generations

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In this context, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky asked Moscow to sit down to negotiate seriously, to prevent this war from affecting even the Russians themselves. “This is the only opportunity for Russia to reduce the damage of its own mistakes,” said the president, in a video recorded at night and broadcast on social networks. “I want the whole world to listen to me now, especially in Moscow. It’s time to meet, it’s time to talk, it’s time to restore territorial integrity and justice for Ukraine,” he added. “Otherwise Russia’s losses will be such that she will need several generations to recover,” Zelensky concluded.

In an intervention broadcast later, the Ukrainian head of state also insisted on the delicate situation of Mariupol, a city “that is destroyed and where there is nothing to eat”. And, immediately afterwards, speaking by video call before the participants of an act of solidarity in support of Ukraine in Bern, the capital of Switzerland, Zelenski said that he “knows well” the peace standards of the Swiss country and would like Ukraine to have them too. “We had headed (this way) but everything changed after February 24,” when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, he reflected. the president of the country.

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