Ukraine War: Battle on for Strategic Mariupol Port, Ukraine Says Ready to Give up Demand for NATO Membership

Manas Dasgupta

NEW DELHI, March 22: As the US president Joe Biden cautioned that Russia could be planning to use chemical and biological weapons against Ukraine, the war-torn country urged Russia again to allow humanitarian supplies into the besieged city of Mariupol the battle for which was still raging on Tuesday.

While Ukraine claimed that it had re-taken some of the suburbs of the capital city of Kyiv from the Russian “occupants,” the battle for the control of the strategic port Mariupol raged on after Ukraine refused the Russian call to surrender and evacuate its troops from the besieged city. The Ukrainian army also claimed that it had forced Russian troops out of Makariv, a strategically important Kyiv suburb, after a fierce battle.

Making a new appeal to Russia to allow humanitarian supplies and to let the civilians leave Mariupol, Ukraine deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said, “We demand the opening of a humanitarian corridor for civilians,” and claimed that Russia’s armed forces were preventing humanitarian supplies from reaching residents of the southern city of Kherson.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said late Monday he was prepared to discuss a commitment from Ukraine not to seek NATO membership in exchange for a cease-fire, the withdrawal of Russian troops and a guarantee of Ukraine’s security. Zelensky also accused the NATO members to be “scared” of Russia for which it was not willing to grant full membership to Ukraine.

Five people have been killed and more than a dozen wounded in Russian strikes on a war-scared town in eastern Ukraine, an official in Kyiv said Tuesday, nearly one month into Russian invasion. “In the Donetsk region, Avdiivka was fired on by artillery and aircraft, the city was razed to the ground. Five civilians were killed and 19 were injured,” Ukraine’s ombudswoman, Lyudmyla Denisova, said in a statement. She said the attack occurred late Monday.

Avdiivka in the east of Ukraine is adjacent to the de-facto capital of pro-Moscow separatists, who wrested control of two self-proclaimed republics in 2014. Ukraine has accused Russian troops of indiscriminately targeting medical facilities, residential areas, and bomb shelters since Moscow sent troops over the borders of its pro-Western neighbour on February 24.

Ukrainian forces said they retook a strategically important suburb of the capital early Tuesday, while Russia’s attack on the embattled southern port of Mariupol raged unabated, with fleeing civilians describing relentless bombardments and corpses lying in the streets.

While Russian forces carried on with the siege of Mariupol after the southern port city’s defenders refused demands to surrender, the Kremlin’s ground offensive in other parts of the country advanced slowly or not at all, knocked back by lethal hit-and-run attacks by the Ukrainians.

Early Tuesday, Ukrainian troops forced Russian forces out of the Kyiv suburb of Makariv after a fierce battle, Ukraine’s Defence Ministry said. The regained territory allowed Ukrainian forces to retake control of a key highway and block Russian troops from surrounding Kyiv from the northwest. But the Defence Ministry said Russian forces battling toward Kyiv were able to partially take other northwest suburbs, Bucha, Hostomel and Irpin, some of which had been under attack almost since Russia’s military invaded late last month.

With troops bogged down in many places, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces are increasingly concentrating their air power and artillery on Ukraine’s cities and the civilians living there, killing uncounted numbers and sending millions fleeing. Russia denies purposefully targeting civilians and has instead accused Ukrainian forces of using civilians as human shields. Denisova said in a separate post on the Telegram that a Russian tank in the Kharkiv region had targeted a civilian-marked car and that three adults and a child were killed.

Russia’s false accusations that Kyiv has biological and chemical weapons illustrate that Russian President Vladimir Putin is considering using them himself in his war against Ukraine, US President Joe Biden said Monday, without citing evidence. Putin’s “back is against the wall and now he’s talking about new false flags he’s setting up including, asserting that we in America have biological as well as chemical weapons in Europe, simply not true,” Biden said at a Business Roundtable event.

“They are also suggesting that Ukraine has biological and chemical weapons in Ukraine. That’s a clear sign he’s considering using both of those.” The US embassy in Kyiv cited Ukraine’s foreign ministry as saying that 2,389 Ukrainian children have been “illegally removed” from the Russian-controlled territories of Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts and taken to Russia. “This is not assistance. It is kidnapping,” it said.

Some of Ukraine’s most vulnerable orphans have reached relative safety at a hospital in Kyiv where doctors hope to be able to provide care and perform life-saving surgeries. More than 70 children, including infants, who have spent the past two weeks cared for in bomb shelters in the besieged city of Sumy in north-eastern Ukraine have been safely evacuated, local officials said over the weekend.

Most were transferred to Lviv in western Ukraine but some were too sick to continue the journey. Four infants are now being treated at the Kyiv Heart Centre, the country’s leading cardiology and cardiac surgery hospital. ‘These children have no parents, they lived in an orphanage. All four were born earlier this year,’ said Borys Todurov, a cardiac surgeon at Kyiv Heart Centre.

‘They found themselves on the frontline, they found themselves in a situation where they needed help but there was no one to help them because the fighting started,’ he said, adding that they were unable to travel on to Lviv because they were ‘in critical condition.’