Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky vowed victory on the 100th day of Russia’s invasion on Friday, even as Russian troops pounded the eastern Donbas region.
Thousands of people had been killed, millions sent fleeing and towns turned into rubble since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his troops into Ukraine on February 24.
Russia’s advance had been slowed by a fierce Ukrainian resistance which repelled them from around the capital and forced Moscow to shift its aims towards capturing the east.
“Victory will be ours,” Zelensky said in a video address similar to one he posted at the onset of the war outside government buildings in Kyiv.
But Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, “certain results have been achieved”, pointing to the liberation of some areas from what he called the “pro-Nazi armed forces of Ukraine.”
The West had sent ever more potent weapons to Ukraine and piled on ever more stringent sanctions, with the European Union also on Friday, formally adopting a ban on most Russian oil imports.
Putin’s alleged girlfriend, former gymnast Alina Kabaeva, was also added to an assets freeze and visa-ban blacklist, along with Russian army personnel suspected of war crimes.
At the same time, the United Nations said it was leading intense negotiations with Russia to allow tens of millions of tons of grains to leave Ukrainian ports to avert a global food crisis.
– No problem on grain export –
“I am optimistic that something could give in, something could be made,” said Amin Awad, the UN crisis coordinator for Ukraine, voicing hope that we could “see a breakthrough”.
Putin in a televised interview late Friday said there was “no problem” to export grain from Ukraine, via Kyiv- or Moscow-controlled Ukrainian ports, or even via central Europe.
He said this could be done from the Russian-controlled ports of Mariupol and Berdyansk, or the Ukrainian-held port of Odessa as long as Ukraine “cleared” the waters around it.
Russian troops now occupy a fifth of Ukraine’s territory and Moscow has imposed a blockade on the country’s Black Sea ports.
The UN had warned that especially African countries, which imported more than half of their wheat consumption from Ukraine and Russia, face an “unprecedented” crisis caused by the conflict.
Food prices in Africa had already exceeded those in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab springs and the 2008 food riots.
On Friday, Putin met the head of the African Union, Senegalese President Macky Sall, at his Black Sea residence in Sochi.
Sall told Putin that African countries “are victims” in the Ukraine conflict.
AFP
