Will the turning point come on war day 34? Skepticism is appropriate, but Moscow has announced that fighting near Kyiv and Chernihiv will be scaled back. Despite this, the so-called military operation in Ukraine is said to continue.
A first glimmer of hope for peace? After new talks with Ukraine, Russia has pledged to significantly reduce its combat operations on the northern front near Kyiv and Chernihiv. Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin said after the meeting in Istanbul that his government wanted to build trust and enable further negotiations. Moscow’s head of delegation, Vladimir Medinsky, praised the talks, which lasted several hours, as constructive. Russia is therefore ready to take steps towards de-escalation.
After the meeting, the Ukrainian government again demanded tough guarantees from the West for its security in exchange for a possible neutral status. She rejected the cession of territory as out of the question.
After the meeting in Istanbul, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu summed up that significant progress had been made. The war must “end now”. There will be no continuation of the negotiations this Wednesday.
Moscow attacked its neighbor Ukraine on February 24 after months of troop deployment at the borders. A few days ago, Russia’s Defense Ministry announced that it was now concentrating on completely conquering the Donbass in eastern Ukraine, where fighting has been going on since 2014.
Moscow expects neutral status of Ukraine
Fomin said after the meeting in Istanbul that Ukraine is preparing a treaty on neutral status without nuclear weapons. His government assumes that Ukraine will make the appropriate decisions. According to the head of the Russian delegation, the Ukrainian proposals will now be examined, presented to President Vladimir Putin and “answered accordingly”.
The Ukrainian delegation member David Arakhamija said that the required security guarantees should come from the permanent members of the UN Security Council such as the USA, France, Great Britain, China or Russia. Turkey, Germany, Canada, Italy, Poland, Israel and other countries could also be added. They should be worded similarly to article five of the NATO treaty. Accordingly, the members of the military alliance are obliged to provide immediate military assistance in the event of an attack on one of the partners.
Kyiv: Territorial transfers out of the question
Arachamija said that cessions of territory are still out of the question for Kyiv. “We only recognize Ukraine’s borders, which are recognized by the world as of 1991,” stressed the faction leader of the presidential party.
Presidential adviser Mykhailo Podoliak said that the issue of Ukraine’s Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, annexed by Russia, should be discussed after the end of hostilities, within 15 years. The status of the areas of Donetsk and Luhansk in the Donbass, which are ruled by pro-Moscow separatists, should also be excluded from a current peace solution.
Negotiators from Ukraine and Russia had previously met three times in the Belarusian border area, after which there were regular video conferences.
In the afternoon, Russia seemed to be putting its announcement into practice: the Ukrainian general staff announced that the withdrawal of individual Russian units was being observed in the area around the capital Kyiv and the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv. According to local authorities, more than 350 people had already died in attacks on Chernihiv in the weeks before.
EU accession and NATO renunciation
Russia’s negotiator Vladimir said Ukraine wants to negotiate the possibility of joining the EU in exchange for concessions to Moscow. The Ukrainian proposal provides: “The Russian Federation has no objections to Ukraine’s efforts to join the European Union,” said Medinski. Kyiv, in turn, has held out the prospect of renouncing NATO membership, as demanded by Moscow, while guaranteeing security guarantees.
Fighting in Ukraine continues
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi reported in the morning that Russian units had been repulsed from the city of Irpin near Kyiv, which had been fought over for weeks. However, fighting continued there and in other parts of the country. According to the president, Russian troops kept the north of the Kiev region under control. They tried to rebuild shattered units. The situation also remains “very difficult” in the Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkiv, Donbass and southern Ukraine regions. Selenskyj again called for tougher sanctions against Russia.
In a video link in the Danish parliament, Zelenskyj also spoke about the situation in the besieged port city of Mariupol. What the Russian troops were doing there was a crime against humanity. He asked why the world hadn’t intervened.
The Kremlin continues to threaten to stop gas supplies
The Kremlin also maintained the threat that Russia could cut off gas supplies to Western Europe if buyer countries – including Germany – continued to refuse the demand to pay in rubles instead of dollars and euros. This would support the currency, which has come under pressure from many tough sanctions, because the West would have to obtain rubles.
“No pay – no gas,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told PBS. Moscow wants to wait for the final answer from the EU and then determine the next steps.
At the same time, Kremlin spokesman Peskov countered speculation that Moscow could use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war. “No one in Russia thinks about using nuclear weapons, or even the idea of using them,” he said in the PBS interview. Russia only resorts to the nuclear arsenal if there is a “threat to its existence”. The state existence of Russia and the events in Ukraine have “nothing to do with each other”. Concern in the West about Moscow’s possible nuclear weapons plans increased when Putin ordered the Russian nuclear forces to be on alert at the start of the war of aggression in Ukraine.
Ukraine: Many men are returning
According to the Ukrainian border police, around 510,000 people have returned from abroad since the beginning of the war. In the past week alone there were 110,000 people, said a spokesman for the daily newspaper “Welt”. Eight out of ten travelers are men.
Before the war began, around 44 million people lived in Ukraine. According to the UN refugee agency UNHCR, around 3.9 million people have fled abroad.
Source: Stern
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