Russia-Ukraine war: Key things to know about the conflict

Details

Written by northsouth

Category: Europe

Published: 13 March 2022

Hits: 882

MARIUPOL, UKRAINE - A relentless assault on the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol continued Saturday, as Russian forces shelled the city’s downtown, including an area around a mosque that was sheltering more than 80 people — some children.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Moscow has warned the United States that Moscow could attack convoys carrying military equipment to Ukraine, calling them “legitimate targets.” U.S. President Joe Biden announced additional aid to Ukraine of up to $200 million for weapons, military services, education and training.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Saturday accused Russia of trying to create new “pseudo-republics” to break his country apart. He called on Ukraine’s regions not to repeat the experience of two eastern regions where pro-Russian separatists began fighting Ukrainian forces in 2014.

Russian units fanned out to prepare for an assault on Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv. Zelenskyy said Russia would need to carpet-bomb Kyiv and kill its residents to take the city.

Now in its third week, the war has forced more than 2.5 million people to flee Ukraine.

Here are some key things to know about the conflict:

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN BESIEGED MARIUPOL?

Russian shelling of this Ukrainian port city of 430,000 has been relentless, and the mayor’s office says more than 1,500 have died since the siege began. Russian forces hammered the city’s downtown on Saturday as residents hid.

The Ukrainian government said a mosque where people sought shelter in the city’s center was shelled. However, an unverified Instagram post by a man claiming to be the mosque association’s president said the mosque itself wasn’t hit, but a bomb fell about 750 yards (700 meters) away. The Ukrainian Embassy in Turkey said 86 Turkish nationals, including 34 children, were among those who had sought safety in the mosque.

Repeated attempts to bring food to Mariupol and evacuate civilians have been canceled due to ongoing Russian fire. The unceasing shelling has even interrupted efforts to bury the dead in mass graves.

On Saturday, a Ukrainian official said Russian soldiers blocked a humanitarian convoy headed for Mariupol and stole from another. Doctors Without Borders said some residents are dying for lack of medication, with the city without drinking water or medicine for over a week now. The aid group says people are resorting to boiling water from the ground or extracted from heating pipes.

Ukraine’s military said Russian forces captured Mariupol’s eastern outskirts. Taking Mariupol and other ports on the Azov Sea would be strategic for Russian President Vladimir Putin, as it could allow Russia to establish a land corridor to Crimea, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014.

WHAT HAS THE AP DIRECTLY WITNESSED OR CONFIRMED?

An Associated Press journalist witnessed tanks firing on a 9-story apartment block in Mariupol and was with a group of medical workers who came under sniper fire on Friday. Conditions at a local hospital there were deteriorating, electricity was reserved for operating tables and the hallways were lined with people with nowhere else to go.

Anastasiya Erashova wept and trembled as she held a sleeping child. Shelling had just killed her other child as well as her brother’s child. “No one was able to save them,” she said.

In Irpin, on the northwest outskirts of Kyiv, bodies laid in the open in a park and on a street Saturday. Serhy Protsenko walked his neighborhood as explosions sounded.

“When I woke up in the morning, everything was covered in smoke, everything was dark. We don’t know who is shooting and where,” he said. “We don’t have any radio or information.”

Some residents huddled in a pitch-dark basement for shelter, unsure where they could go and how they would get food if they left. Others were on the move, toting luggage across planks to get over a waterway where a bridge had been damaged. Armed men carried one older man on a stretcher.

Sergiy Stakhovsky, a recently retired professional tennis player from Ukraine, has left his wife and three young children at home in Hungary and is back in Ukraine, serving with the territorial defense, a branch of the Ukraine armed forces.

Stakhovsky said in a video interview with The Associated Press that he would never have imagined he would be in his home city with a gun in his hands.

“The first couple of days (it’s) surreal, you don’t believe it is actually happening,” he said. “The next thing you know you know you get used to it and you’re just trying to find a way of helping your country to actually survive.”

He earned more than $5 million in prize money in tennis and upset Roger Federer at Wimbledon in 2013. Stakhovsky’s last match came in Australian Open qualifying in January.

WHAT ELSE IS HAPPENING ON THE GROUND IN UKRAINE?

In the northeast, Russian forces were blockading Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, even as efforts have been made to create new humanitarian corridors around it and other urban centers.

Ukraine’s emergency services reported that the bodies of five people were pulled from an apartment building that was struck by shelling in Kharkiv, including two women, a man and two children.

In multiple areas around Kyiv, heavy artillery fire sent residents scurrying for shelter as air raid sirens wailed. An ammunition depot outside the city was shelled overnight, sending billowing black smoke into the sky, according to video provided by emergency workers.

Britain’s Defense Ministry said Russian ground forces that had been north of Kyiv for most of the war had edged to within 25 kilometers (15 miles) of the city center and spread out, likely to support an attempted encirclement.

THE MOST VULNERABLE

Ukraine’s chief prosecutor’s office says at least 79 children have been killed since the invasion began on Feb. 24. At least 2.5 million people have fled the country, according to the United Nations refugee agency.

About 60 child cancer patients from Ukraine boarded a medical train Saturday in Medyka, Poland, bound for hospitals in Warsaw and elsewhere. Medical workers carried some of the children in their arms, on stretchers and pushed them in wheelchairs at the train station near the Ukrainian border.

Dominik Daszuta, an anesthesiologist from Warsaw Hospital, said the train has transported 120 children with cancer so far.

Ukraine’s defense ministry said Saturday that Russian forces shelled a convoy of refugees fleeing Peremoha, a village about 20 kilometers (12 miles) northeast of Kyiv, killing seven people including a child.

The seven were among hundreds of people who tried to flee Peremoha. An unknown number of people were wounded, the report added.

Moscow has said it would establish humanitarian corridors out of conflict zones, but Ukrainian officials have accused Russia of disrupting those paths and firing on civilians.

Elena Yurchuk, a nurse from the northern city of Chernihiv, was in a Romanian train station Saturday with her teenage son, Nikita, doubting that their home was still standing. Her hometown has been heavily shelled.

“We have nowhere to go back to. Nothing left,” said Yurchuk, 44, who hopes to find work in Germany.

WHAT ARE PUTIN, ZELENSKYY AND OTHER WORLD LEADERS SAYING?

Putin participated in a 90-minute phone call Saturday with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Macron’s office said the call was “very frank and also difficult.”

The Kremlin said Putin laid out his demands for ending the war, including Ukraine’s demilitarization. Moscow has also demanded that Ukraine drop its bid to join NATO, adopt a neutral status and acknowledge Russian sovereignty over Crimea, among other things. Putin also threatened to seize the assets of U.S. and Western companies that have announced plans to leave Russia.

Zelenskyy again deplored NATO’s refusal to declare a no-fly zone over Ukraine. He said Ukraine has sought ways to procure air defense assets, though he didn’t elaborate.

Zelenskyy also told Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett that he would be open to meeting Putin in Jerusalem to discuss an end to the war, but that first there would have to be a cease-fire. Putin has ignored Zelenskyy’s previous offers to talk.

War in Ukraine seen as watershed for EU gas addiction

Details

Written by northsouth

Category: Europe

Published: 01 March 2022

Hits: 822

By ELENA SÁNCHEZ NICOLÁS

BRUSSELS - Western sanctions, while unprecedented, have left the Russian energy exports largely unscathed – raising questions about the EU's willingness to break its addiction to natural gas.

And with prices of gas soaring, and costs for ordinary Europeans a looming political hot potato, there is resistance to making a clean break even though petroleum and oil and gas make up the country's largest export products by value.

But on Monday (28 February), a number of EU energy ministers called on the rest of the bloc to make the Russian invasion of Ukraine a turning point for the way Europe gets its energy.

Cutting European demand for the coal, oil and gas imported from Russia would be "the best way to take on Vladimir Putin," Irish environment and climate minister Eamon Ryan said ahead of a ministerial meeting in Brussels.

"Our reliance on fossil fuels has cost us dearly," said Ryan, referring both to the EU's Russia-dependence and the climate.

Spanish energy minister Teresa Ribera said reliance on Russia had created "an immense fragility" in the European energy system that required a rapid acceleration of the transition to cleaner — and therefore non-Russian — sources.

Belgian energy minister Tinne van der Straeten echoed that. She noted that the war, despite its scale and unfolding horror, had not disrupted gas flows from Russia to the EU.

The invasion of Ukraine was not only "a watershed moment" for the security architecture of Europe but also for the bloc's energy system, EU energy commissioner Kadri Simson told a press conference.

The invasion "has made our vulnerability painfully clear," said Simons, who added that, in the long term, the best solution was an overhaul of the continent's energy systems under the European Green Deal, which mandates no net emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050.

Financing the war with euros?
Russia's sales of oil and natural gas accounted for about 36 percent of its budget in 2021, totalling over €100bn, according to data released in January by its finance ministry.

Those sales amount to 10 percent of global oil supplies — and 40 percent of Europe's gas demand.

To be sure, the EU and allies like the US are hurting the Russian economy — but they are mostly keeping oil and gas trade flowing in a bid to stave off inflation and volatility in the energy markets.

The EU, US, and their allies agreed on Saturday to cut off a number of Russian banks from the international-payments system SWIFT as a step toward isolating Russia from the international financial system.

Even so, authorities on both sides of the Atlantic are coordinating to spare those banks handling most of the energy flows to limit energy supply disruptions, a senior US administration official told a press briefing on Sunday.

UN secretary-general António Guterres said on Monday that events in Ukraine helped to illustrate how fossil-fuel reliance made the global economy and energy security vulnerable to "geopolitical shocks and crises."

His warning came as the latest report of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on Monday sounded the alarm on the devastating impacts that climate change — driven by centuries of burning fossil fuels — has had on nature and people.

Hans-Josef Fell, a former member of the German parliament for the Green Party and the founder of the Berlin-based Energy Watch Group, said energy sanctions would be "the only way to really hurt the Russian economy."

A massive expansion of renewable energies would reduce Europe's energy and political dependence on Russia and, he said, finally put an end to "financing the Russian war economy with hundreds of billions of euros."

Why has Russia invaded Ukraine?

Details

Written by northsouth

Category: Europe

Published: 25 February 2022

Hits: 748

LONDON - Russia has finally launched its long-feared “full-scale invasion” of Ukraine after Vladimir Putin announced a “special military operation” in a televised address to his citizens in the early hours of Thursday morning, writes The Independent.

Explosions were reported soon afterwards on the outskirts of the cities of Kharkiv, Kramatorsk, Mariupol, as well as the capital Kyiv, prompting many Ukrainians to form queues at supermarkets, ATMs and petrol stations in preparation for weathering the siege or attempting to flee.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said his government has introduced martial law in all territories of the state and urged citizens to stay at home as much as possible.

Meanwhile the country’s airports have been shut down temporarily and secured against potential Russian aircraft landings while Russia has closed its own airspace around the border to civilian access for the next four months.

According to Mr Zelensky, 137 Ukrainian civilians and soldiers were killed on the first day of fighting and another 316 injured as he appealed to the international community to do more to help. He pledged to remain in Kyiv as Russian missile strikes began to target the city in the early hours of Friday morning.

Tensions in Eastern Europe have rumbled on since December when Russia stationed an estimated 130,000 soldiers along its western border and then another 30,000 in Belarus, consistently denying it had any attention of making incursions into Ukraine.

Frantic diplomatic negotiations were pursued by the likes of US secretary of state Antony Blinken, French president Emmanuel Macron, German chancellor Olaf Scholz and UK foreign secretary Liz Truss in the hoping of averting calamity but ultimately appear to have come to nothing.

The situation escalated drastically on Monday when Mr Putin moved to officially recognise the pro-Russian breakaway regions of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) as independent states, enabling him to move military resources into those areas in anticipation of the coming assault under the guise of extending protection to allies.

The international community hit out at the decision, with the United Nations Security Council expressing “great concern” and the US suggesting, apparently correctly, that the play was a pretext for a full-scale military assault.

Vassily Nebenzia, the Russian ambassador to the UN, insisted there would be no “new bloodbath” in eastern Ukraine but warned the West to “think twice” before making matters worse.

US president Joe Biden, UK prime minister Boris Johnson and UN secretary general Antonio Guterres have since joined other global powers in condemning Moscow’s “unprovoked and unjustified” attack of Thursday morning and promised to hold it “accountable”, with the Western powers subsequently introducing another round of tough economic sanctions against Russian banks and businesses.

The sanctions so far unveiled by the West, including steps taken to hinder Russian banks and wealthy plutocrats from doing business abroad and the blocking of regulatory approval for the lucrative Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline, have been criticised as inadequate and senior Russia officials like Dmitry Medvedev and Sergey Lavrov have shrugged them off with a smirk.

The return of warfare to the region comes eight years after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula and sparked fighting in the industrial heartland of Donbas, where a low-level conflict that has since killed more than 14,000 people is still rumbling on between Kyiv and the pro-Russian separatists.

In anticipation of the all-out war the West hoped would never come, the North Atlantic military alliance previously sent additional ships and fighter jets to deployments in neighbouring eastern states like Poland and Lithuania – who are now bracing for an influx of refugees as many Ukrainians flee their homeland for safety– while the US and UK withdrew diplomats’ families from Ukraine as a precaution and some airlines stopped making flights into Kyiv.

The UK and the US have already provided Ukraine with some additional forces, the former flying anti-tank weapons to the country, stationing 350 soldiers in Poland and placing another 1,000 on standby and doubling its troop deployment in Estonia. Further weapons and resources are now expected to follow.

But such gestures are likely to prove cold comfort to Kyiv given the significant gulf in military strength between the two combatants.

While Ukraine has under 250,000 troops and is looking to add a further 130,000 to its ranks, Russia has almost a million soldiers at its disposal. It also has much more sophisticated and abundant military hardware.

Speaking of the disparity between the two armies, Vadym Prystaiko, Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK, said it is unfortunate that his country is not part of Nato.

“We are not part of this family and we are facing the biggest army in Europe by ourselves,” he said.

Mr Putin is believed to view the current situation as the first step towards correcting what he regards as Nato’s encroachment into countries like Ukraine that were previously ruled by the Soviet Union prior to its collapse in 1989.

With polls showing that a large majority of Ukrainians would like their country to become a member of the military alliance, Moscow wants the West to promise that this will never come to pass, something Nato has categorically ruled out.

Mr Putin laid out his own thoughts on Ukraine and its relationship with Russia in a 5,000-word essay published last summer.

Entitled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, the treatise was “one step short of a declaration of war”, in the opinion of Anders Aslund, a senior fellow at the Stockholm Free World Forum.

The Russian president reiterated his claim that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people”, suggesting that his homeland was “robbed” when Ukraine won its independence from the USSR.

Elsewhere in the essay, he offered more overt threats towards Kyiv, declaring: “I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia.”

A matter of months later, he dispached his tens of thousands of troops to the border.