UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for a ceasefire in Ukraine “as soon as possible” during a visit to Moscow yesterday. Guterres, who met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov before meeting with President Putin, said: “We are particularly concerned about finding ways to create the right conditions for effective dialogue and an early ceasefire.”
He added that, despite the complexity of the situation in Ukraine, “with different interpretations of what is happening,” it is possible to establish “a serious dialogue on ways to work to alleviate the suffering of the population” there.
The UN Secretary-General travels from Moscow to Kyiv, where he has been criticized for choosing to visit Moscow over Ukraine, and President Volodymyr Zelensky has said he sees “neither justice nor logic in that order” of the visits.
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the United Nations has appeared marginalized in the context of this conflict for several reasons, including the estrangement caused by this crisis between the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, namely Russia, the US, France, the UK and China.
Meanwhile, the US yesterday discussed in Germany about forty allied countries to provide more weapons to Ukraine in the face of a Russian invasion, and Moscow warned of a “real” danger of a third world war.
As the war in Ukraine sparks unprecedented tensions between Russia and the West, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has hinted at the possibility of the war escalating into a global conflict.
Austin held a meeting at the Ramstein base in Germany with representatives from about forty countries “to provide additional capabilities to Ukrainian forces,” the US Secretary of Defense said.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky said that the victory of Ukraine is only a matter of time. “Thanks to your courage and the wisdom of our defenders, thanks to the courage of Ukrainians and all Ukrainians, our country is a true symbol of the struggle for freedom,” he said on Monday evening.
A source in the German government said yesterday that Germany would allow the supply of tanks to Ukraine.
The United States announced $700 million in additional military aid to Ukraine, bringing the total aid to $3.4 billion.
The Americans are now providing Kyiv with heavy weapons to repel Russian forces that have concentrated their efforts in eastern and southern Ukraine after they failed to take control of Kyiv.
“We want Russia to be exhausted to the point where it can’t take steps like invading Ukraine,” Austin said. Moscow has not announced casualties since March 25, when it confirmed that it had lost 1,351 of its soldiers.
The Russian military said it hit about 100 targets in Ukraine on Monday, mostly railway facilities in the center of the country.
For its part, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said that the Russian army continues to strengthen its air defense and compensate for the losses associated with the previous attack and bombardment of infrastructure.
The same source confirmed that the Russian army was mobilizing its forces in the south of the country and trying to advance towards Zaporozhye (east), but suffered losses and did not reach it.
Russia claims it wants to control the entire Donbass, a large industrial basin in eastern Ukraine, parts of which have been controlled by pro-Moscow separatists since 2014, and control the entire south of the country, where daily fighting takes place.
On the ground, in the strategic coastal city of Maripol in the far south of the Donbass, which is almost entirely controlled by the Russians and where, according to Kyiv, about 100,000 civilians are still stranded, the situation seemed to come to a standstill.
Russian forces continue to shell the Azovstal steel plant, where the last Ukrainian militants with about a thousand civilians have taken refuge, they say, Ukrainian commander of the Donetsk region Pavlo Kirilenko confirmed on Facebook.
“The shelling with the use of heavy artillery and aviation continues,” he said. We rely only on our own strength.”
In the rest of the Donbas, the Ukrainian army has confirmed that it has repulsed a series of Russian attacks in Donetsk and Luhansk, where many cities such as Robezhne are bombed daily. Moscow has accused Kyiv of preventing civilians from leaving Azovstal, but Ukraine has stressed that no agreement has been reached with Russia to create humanitarian corridors to allow them to leave.
Fighting also continued in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city in the northeast of the country. Daily shelling forces civilians in the affected areas to sleep in basements for weeks.
Investigation of the hacking operation of British soldiers
The British Ministry of Defense said yesterday that it was investigating a hack into Russian computer systems that, according to the Daily Mail, targeted more than 100 army recruits.
The newspaper reported that the hack made it possible to illegally reveal the identities of 124 candidates wishing to join the army.
“I know that my colleague Leo Docherty (Deputy Secretary of Defense) in charge of recruiting has requested an urgent security check of our information system, and this seems to be a very strange intelligence target, given that it is aimed at newly trained soldiers. … I thought the Kremlin would have higher intelligence targets.”
Moldovan rally after explosions in self-proclaimed Transnistria
The Moldovan president is holding a meeting of the National Security Council yesterday amid a series of bombings in the region of Transnistria, a breakaway region backed by Russia, raising fears that the conflict in Ukraine will spread to the small country in Eastern Europe. Two explosions destroyed a radio mast yesterday, and separatist authorities reported on Monday that they had been hit by a rocket-propelled grenade from a ministry in Tiraspol. The two incidents did not result in casualties, but raised fears that the conflict in neighboring Ukraine would spill over into Moldova.
Several people died in a shooting at a kindergarten in central Russia
Several people, including children, were killed yesterday when a man opened fire in a kindergarten in the Ulyanovsk region, Russian news agencies reported. According to preliminary information, two children died. As for the Interfax news agency, it reported the death of four people.
London cancels customs duties on Ukrainian goods
The UK has announced the abolition of all customs duties on Ukrainian goods and a ban on the export of certain sensitive technologies to Russia in order to help Ukraine resist the Russian invasion.
“Customs duties on all goods imported from Ukraine are now eliminated and the quota system will be completely abolished,” the UK government said in a statement.
This measure was taken in response to a direct request from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the statement said. The measure mainly concerns barley, honey, poultry and canned tomatoes, which Ukraine exports to the UK.
UN expects 8.3 million Ukrainians to flee
The UN expected that the number of Ukrainian refugees fleeing their country, which was invaded by the Russian army on February 24, would reach 8.3 million people. According to the international organization, today more than 5.2 million Ukrainians have left their country.
As the situation deteriorated, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, who at the beginning of the conflict expected four million Ukrainians to leave the country, has asked for $1.85 billion to support his work and that of his partners in helping people fleeing the war in Ukraine. .
UNHCR spokeswoman Shabia Mantou told a press conference in Geneva that the overview of the expected number of refugees “has been prepared in cooperation with the authorities and neighboring countries, but it is important to remember that the situation is evolving rapidly.”
The United Nations also announced that it has doubled its flash appeal to raise funds for humanitarian assistance for 8.7 million people in Ukraine, bringing the total to $2.25 billion.
UN expects 8.3 million Ukrainians to flee