Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, March 28: Even as fresh and “more result-oriented” peace talks are scheduled to begin between Russia and battle-torn Ukraine this week, Ukraine said it did not see any sign of Moscow giving up its plan of surrounding and possibly capturing its capital city of Kyiv.
This week, Ukraine and Russia will hold their first face-to-face peace talks in more than two weeks and both the sides keeping their fingers crossed hoping that it would be more fruitful and could yield some results after several rounds of virtual talks ended earlier without any tangible progress. Ukraine insists that it will make no concessions on territorial integrity as battlefield momentum has shifted in its favour but the president Volodymyr Zelensky has said Ukraine was ready to consider Russia’s demand for its maintaining neutrality. But the Ukrainian defence ministry spokesperson Oleksander Motuzyanyk said on Monday Ukraine see no signs on the ground that Russia had given up a plan to surround the capital Kyiv. The disposition of Russian forces during the past 24 hours has seen no significant change, and instead Russia has gained more ground in the vicinity of Mariupol, British military intelligence said.
With the peace talks set to begin this week, possibly Monday evening or Tuesday, Zelensky said Kyiv’s negotiators were studying a Russian demand for Ukrainian neutrality. Russia said previous rounds of talks have made little progress. “So far we cannot state any significant achievements or breakthroughs,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov says, while hailing the fact that the two sides were preparing for their first face-to-face talks in weeks.
Ukraine military intelligence also claimed that Russia was trying to split Ukraine in two to create a Moscow-controlled region after failing to take over the whole country. Nearly 160,000 people are trapped without power in Mariupol, the city’s mayor said. Ukraine’s deputy prime minister said evacuations of civilians from cities under attack is being paused due to reports of attacks by Russian troops while at least 1,119 civilians have been killed since Russia’s invasion on February 24. “Significant” new fires have broken out in the exclusion zone around the defunct Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which is occupied by Russian forces, Ukrainian authorities say.
Russia’s invasion has so far cost Ukraine $564.9 billion in terms of damage to infrastructure, lost economic growth and other factors, Economy Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said.
Russia’s top independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, whose chief editor was last year awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, said it was suspending publication until the end of Moscow’s military action in Ukraine.
The Kremlin said peace talks between Russia and Ukraine may get underway in Turkey on Tuesday and it was important that they would take place face-to-face, after what it described as a lack of major progress in negotiations so far. Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Tayyip Erdogan agreed in a telephone call on Sunday for Istanbul to host the talks, which Ankara hopes will lead to a ceasefire in Ukraine.
Turkey said the talks could begin as early as Monday, but Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said it was unlikely as the negotiators would only be arriving in Turkey on Monday. Meanwhile, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk has said that Ukraine has no plans to open any humanitarian corridors to evacuate civilians from besieged cities on Monday because of intelligence reports warning of possible Russian “provocations” along the routes. Russia is increasingly focused on grinding down Ukraine’s military in the east in the hope of forcing Kyiv into surrendering part of the country’s territory to possibly end the war.
Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi on Monday discussed the latest developments of the war in Ukraine with Zelensky and reiterated Rome’s support for the Ukrainian authorities and people, Draghi’s office said. “President Zelensky lamented the Russian blocking of humanitarian corridors and its continuing siege and bombardment of cities, including schools, resulting in civilian casualties, including children,” Draghi’s office said. Draghi expressed Italy’s “full willingness to contribute to international action to end the war and promote a lasting solution to the crisis in Ukraine.”
Moscow broke all rules of international order by using force to shift borders and it will be Russia that will most severely suffer the consequences of this, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Monday. The need to guarantee security in Europe was one of the core insights of the post-war period that everyone including Russia agreed on after 1990, Scholz said in a news conference after meeting Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson.
“There can only be one answer to that. First, we call on Russia to stop the war. Second, we make ourselves so strong that an attack on EU or NATO countries does not take place, because we are strong enough to answer that,” Scholz said.
The Kremlin said on Monday that US President Joe Biden’s remark that Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power” was a cause for alarm, in a measured response to a public call from the United States for an end to Putin’s 22-year rule. “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden said on Saturday at the end of a speech to a crowd in Warsaw. He cast Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a battle in a much broader conflict between democracy and autocracy. The White House tried to clarify Biden’s remarks and the US president said on Sunday he had not been publicly calling for regime change in Russia, which is the world’s largest country by area and has more nuclear warheads than any other.