The President of Russia, Vladimir Putin on Thursday pledged no let-up in his invasion of Ukraine even as the warring sides met for ceasefire talks and Kyiv appealed for relief supplies to reach shattered cities.
Africa Daily News, New York recalls that following the fall of a first major Ukrainian city to Russian forces, Putin doesn’t seem to be in the mood to heed a global clamour for an end to hostilities as the war entered its second week.
‘Russia intends to continue the uncompromising fight against militants of nationalist armed groups,’ Putin said, according to a Kremlin account of a call with French President Emmanuel Macron.
Ukraine on the other hand have continued to insist that corridors for medical and other supplies were the bare minimum it expected, as negotiators arrived for the talks at an undisclosed location on the Belarus-Poland border.
A first round of talks on Monday yielded no breakthrough, and Kyiv says it will not accept any Russian ‘ultimatums’.
Moscow says it has lost 498 troops and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin would praise their sacrifice at a meeting with his security chiefs.
‘It’s a huge tragedy,’ Peskov told reporters in Moscow.
‘But we also admire the heroism of our soldiers. Their exploits will enter into the history books, their exploits in the struggle against the Nazis.’
The Kremlin has been condemned for likening the government of Zelensky, who is Jewish, to that of Germany in World War II.
But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov kept up a verbal barrage, accusing Western politicians of fixating on ‘nuclear war’ after Putin placed his strategic forces on high alert.
While a long military column appears stalled north of Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, Russian troops seized Kherson, a Black Sea city of 290,000 people, after a three-day siege that left it short of food and medicine.
Africa Daily News, New York reports that Russian troops have been advancing elsewhere on the southern front and are besieging the port city of Mariupol east of Kherson, which is without water or electricity in the depths of winter.
Ukrainian military authorities said residential and other areas in the eastern city of Kharkiv had been “pounded all night” by indiscriminate shelling, which UN prosecutors are investigating as a possible war crime.
AFRICA DAILY NEWS, NEW YORK
