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Russia Ukraine News Highlights | The war in Ukraine is likely to be over by early May when Russia runs out of resources to attack its neighbour, Oleksiy Arestovich, an adviser to the Ukrainian president's chief of staff, said late on Monday. Talks between Kyiv and Moscow - in which Arestovich is not personally involved - have so far produced very few results other than several humanitarian corridors out of besieged Ukrainian cities.
In a video published by several Ukrainian media, Arestovich said the exact timing would depend on how much resources the Kremlin was willing to commit to the campaign. "I think that no later than in May, early May, we should have a peace agreement, maybe much earlier, we will see, I am talking about the latest possible dates," Arestovich said.
"We are at a fork in the road now: there will either be a peace deal struck very quickly, within a week or two, with troop withdrawal and everything, or there will be an attempt to scrape together some, say, Syrians for a round two and, when we grind them too, an agreement by mid-April or late April." A "completely crazy" scenario could also involve Russia sending fresh conscripts after a month of training, he said.
Still, even once peace is agreed, small tactical clashes could remain possible for a year, according to Arestovich, although Ukraine insists on the complete removal of Russian troops from its territory. The war in Ukraine began on Feb. 24 when Russian President Vladimir Putin launched what he called a "special military operation," the biggest attack on a European state since World War Two.
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NATO is worried Russia is gearing up to carry out a chemical attack in Ukraine, secretary general Jens Stoltenberg said Tuesday, ahead of a meeting of the alliance's defence ministers.
"We are concerned that Moscow could stage a false flag operation possibly including chemical weapons," the NATO chief told reporters, citing "absurd claims" from Russia that Ukraine possesses biological weapons labs.
NATO, he said, remains "very vigilant" on that risk and stressed that Russia would have "a high price to pay" if it carried out such a "violation of international law".
Russia imposes sanctions on US President Joe Biden and several top US officials
Russia has placed sanctions on US President Joe Biden, reported news agency AFP. It has also placed sanctions on Secretary of State Antony Blinken, CIA Director William Burns, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and ten other administration officials and political figures.
Russia will put forth its own draft of a resolution regarding humanitarian situation in Ukraine, Moscow's ambassador to the United Nations said on Tuesday. Answering a reporter's question, ambassador Vassily Nebenzia also said Russia will stop its invasion when the goals of its special military operation are achieved in Ukraine, including demilitarization.
Inside her glass-strewn Kyiv apartment, Alla Ragulina cries as she surveys the wreckage of a life shattered by a surge in Russian strikes on the capital.The sheer force of the early morning blast blew out the windows and threw the 64-year-old tax service employee against a wall.Her mother, who is blind and cannot walk, is now in hospital, one of the latest victims of a campaign of shelling that has raised fears of a Russian assault on Kyiv."The explosion was so big," says Ragulina through sobs, shaking with shock after going downstairs to be comforted by other residents."People were sleeping, glass pieces were flying around, I was literally pushed into the wall -- it's really a miracle that nobody was killed."Russian forces trying to encircle Kyiv have intensified strikes on the capital, which has so far been spared the fate of devastated cities such as the southeastern city of Mariupol and Kharkhiv in the northeast.Already gripped by a siege mentality, Kyiv was shaken by four blasts early on Tuesday, hitting residential buildings and a metro station, killing two people.The attacks threaten to drive still more people out of the city, from which an estimated half of its 3.5 million people have fled.
A senior Ukrainian negotiator said Tuesday that talks between Moscow and Kyiv on ending nearly three weeks of fighting in Ukraine had restarted, with both sides having signalled progress."Negotiations are ongoing," a member of the Ukraine delegation and presidential aide, Mykhailo Podolyak, wrote on Twitter, adding that his side would be pushing for a "ceasefire (and) withdrawal of troops from the territory of the country".
Ukraine faced new problems trying to deliver humanitarian aid to the besieged city of Mariupol on Tuesday, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said. Vereshchuk said a convoy with supplies for Mariupol was stuck at nearby Berdyansk and accused Russia of lying about fulfilling agreements to help trapped civilians. Convoys of private cars were not sufficient to evacuate people from Mariupol and buses needed to be let through, she said.
Russia has drawn up lists of 40,000 fighters from Syrian army and allied militias to be put on standby for deployment in Ukraine, a war monitor said Tuesday.The Kremlin said last week that volunteers, including from Syria, were welcome to fight alongside the Russian army in Ukraine.The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and activists said Russian officers, in coordination with the Syrian military and allied militia, had set up registration offices in regime-held areas."More than 40,000 Syrians have registered to fight alongside Russia in Ukraine so far," said Rami Abdel Rahman, who heads the UK-based monitor.Moscow is recruiting Syrians who acquired combat experience during Syria's 11-year-old civil war to bolster the invasion of Ukraine it launched on February 24.Russian officers deployed as part of the force Moscow sent to Syria in 2015 to support Damascus had approved 22,000 of them, Abdel Rahman said.Those fighters are either combatants drawn from the army or pro-regime militias who have experience in street warfare and received Russian training.In a country where soldiers earn between $15 and $35 per month, Russia has promised them a salary of $1,100 to fight in Ukraine, the Observatory reported.They are also entitled to $7,700 in compensation for injuries and their families to $16,500 if they are killed in combat.Another 18,000 men had registered with Syria's ruling Baath party and would be screened by the Wagner Group, a Russian private military contractor with links to the Kremlin, the monitor said.Misinformation about Syrian recruits in Ukraine has been spreading online.Last week, pictures were shared of a Syrian soldier they said had died in Ukraine, but it later appeared he had been killed in his homeland in 2015.
Some 2,000 civilian cars have been able to drive out of the besieged southeastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol along a humanitarian evacuation route, the city authorities said Tuesday."As of 14:00 (1200 GMT) it is known that 2,000 cars left Mariupol," the city council said on Telegram, adding that a further 2,000 vehicles are waiting to leave the city.
Wewill continue to support Ukrainian PresidentVolodymyrZelenskyyand his people –tightening economic sanctions and providing support to help Ukrainians protect themselves from bombardment, UK PM Boris Johnson said.
More than three million people have fled Ukraine since Russia invaded on February 24, nearly half of them minors, with a child becoming a refugee every second, the UN said."We have now reached the three-million mark in terms of movement of people out of Ukraine," Paul Dillon, a spokesman for the United Nations migration agency (IOM), told reporters.Less than three weeks into the invasion, "three million lives uprooted. Three million women, children and vulnerable people separated from their loved ones," IOM chief Antonio Vitorino said in a tweet."We need an immediate cessation of hostilities."The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, meanwhile put the total number of refugees to date at 2.97 million.More than half of them, 1.8 million, have fled to Poland, it said.The UN children's agency meanwhile said that more than 1.4 million of those who have fled are minors."On average, every day over the last 20 days in Ukraine, more than 70,000 children have become refugees," UNICEF spokesman James Elder told reporters in Geneva. That amounts to around 55 every minute, "so almost one per second," he said."This crisis in terms of speed and scale is unprecedented since World War II, and is showing no signs of slowing down."
"Like all children driven from their homes by war and conflicts, Ukrainian children arriving in those border countries are at significant risk of family separation, of violence, of sexual exploitation and trafficking," Elder warned."They're in desperate need of safety, stability and child protection services, especially those who are unaccompanied or have been separated from their families," he said.Elder, who had just returned to Geneva after spending two weeks in Lviv in western Ukraine, described the immense suffering behind the numbers.
"Each one of those children by and large had their father explain to them that their father was staying behind," he said.He said the children he saw "didn't cry. That's not well-behaved children, that's a sign of trauma."Inside Ukraine, the situation is bleaker still.Elder described heartbreaking scenes of paediatricians trying to manage the large numbers of children arriving with wounds of war."The doctors use stickers to prioritise treatment," he said."A green sticker on a child means injured but we leave them, yellow sticker on a child means needs attention, a red sticker on a child means critical attention immediately," he said."And when the paediatricians are forced to put a black sticker on a child, it means the child is alive, but do not give attention, because we don't have the resources and that child will die."
The British government said on Tuesday it had added 350 new listings under its Russia sanctions regime and nine new listings under its cyber sanctions regime. Among those in the latest round of sanctions wereAndreyMelnichenko, who owned majorfertiliserproducerEuroChemGroup and coal companySUEK, PyotrAven, an oil investor who built a European business empire with an estimated net worth of $4.7 billion, and Russia'sdefenceminister SergeiShoigu.
Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Tuesday that Moscow had received guarantees from the US on its ability to trade with Tehran as part of ongoing talks to salvage the Iran nuclear deal."We received written guarantees. They are included in the text of the agreement itself on the resumption of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on the Iranian nuclear program," Lavrov told reporters during a press conference with his Iranian counterpart in Moscow.
