New negotiations begin this Tuesday in Istanbul to try to end the war in Ukraine. What will these talks achieve? If so far, no discussions have succeeded, time is running out. On the 34th day of fighting, the human toll soars as the Russian army gets bogged down.
Mariupol fears the worst…
In Mariupol alone, in the mining basin, 10,000 civilian corpses are buried under the rubble, according to the authorities. The count is approximate. The Russian bombs leave no respite to the port city. The 160,000 stranded Ukrainians don’t even have time to bury their dead. And fear the worst, while Russia announced last Friday to focus on the East.
“All entrances and exits from the city are blocked (…), it is impossible to bring food and medicine into Mariupol,” said Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday evening. The Ukrainian president regularly accuses Russian forces of bombing humanitarian aid convoys negotiated during previous talks. It is precisely on this point that the objectives of the discussions in Turkey rest.
… when some cities regain ground
Ukraine announced on Monday evening that Irpin, the scene of fierce fighting on the outskirts of kyiv, had been “liberated” from Russian forces. Liberated, but not delivered: “It is too early to talk about security in this part of our region. The fighting continues. Russian troops control the northern Kyiv region, have resources and manpower,” Zelensky said in a video on Monday evening.
If the time is not for appeasement, the Ukrainian general staff nevertheless affirmed at the start of the night on Tuesday that its troops had “blocked the progress of the enemy in the Chernigiv region”. In the South, the Russian vice also seemed to loosen around certain cities, such as Mykolaiv, a lock on the road to Odessa, Ukraine’s largest port. The inhabitants seem to find a little hope, after weeks of resistance under the Russian bombs.
“The enemy is weakened, disoriented, most no longer have logistical support and are cut off from the main body of troops,” said the Ukrainian general staff at the start of the night on Tuesday. The front has even retreated significantly, with a Ukrainian counter-offensive on Kherson, some 80 km to the south-east, the only major city for which the Russian army has claimed total capture since February 24.
Few hopes in the talks
Do these “advances” result from Ukrainian victories or from a withdrawal by Putin, who has announced that he is concentrating on the Donbass? Be that as it may, these Ukrainian victories will be claimed by the negotiators, who arrived in Istanbul on Monday. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has already tempered expectations, stressing the lack of “significant progress” in the negotiations so far.
One of the important points of the negotiations concerns “security guarantees and neutrality, the nuclear-free status of our state”, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told Russian media on Sunday. In exchange, Ukraine asks for “security guarantees”.
In the immediate future, the exchanges should focus on the establishment of a stable ceasefire to evacuate the civilians, while more than a quarter of the population has moved, making many refugees. Macron and Putin must also call each other during the day.
Evidence of war crimes?
Amnesty International denounces the cruelty of the Russian offensive, while the regime claims to only target Ukrainian soldiers. The Russian invasion in Ukraine is a “rehearsal” of Syria with a “multiplication of war crimes”, believes the organization, thus validating Ukrainian statements going in this direction.
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And to ensure that evidence has been collected: “Our researchers on site for ten days documented the use of the same tactics as in Syria and Chechnya”, including attacks targeting civilians and the use of ammunition prohibited by the international law,” said the secretary general of the NGO on Tuesday. Allegations confirmed by the images of many media and which earned Putin the qualification of “butcher” by the American president.