Kyiv says top U.S. officials to visit, Russia hits Odesa as conflict enters third month

Ukraine on Saturday said two top U.S. officials would visit its capital, while Russia said its forces attacked Odesa to destroy a logistics terminal where foreign weapons were stored, as the conflict entered its third month on Sunday.

Russia launched a “special military operation” to “demilitarize” and “denazify” Ukraine on February 24. Ukraine and its Western allies reject that as a false pretext for an unprovoked land grab. Earlier this week, Moscow said the second phase of the operation had begun, aiming to “completely liberate” the populations of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Russia’s forces destroyed a logistics terminal at a military airfield near Ukraine’s Odesa, where foreign weapons were stored, said the Russian Defense Ministry on Saturday.

“This afternoon, high-precision, long-range air-based missiles fired by the Russian Aerospace Forces disabled a logistics terminal at a military airfield near Odesa, where a large batch of foreign weapons received from the U.S. and European countries were stored,” said Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov.

On Saturday, Russia also resumed its assault on the last Ukrainian forces holed up in a giant steel works in Mariupol, days after it declared victory in the southern city and said its forces did not need to take the plant.

A key port city on the Azov Sea, Mariupol has witnessed some of the worst violence since February 24. Its capture would allow Russia to connect the Crimean peninsula, which it took over in 2014, to the pro-Moscow breakaway regions in Ukraine’s east by land.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the country’s army was not ready to try to break through the siege of the port city. But he said America’s top diplomat, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin would visit Kyiv on Sunday and discuss the types of weapons Ukraine needs.

“As soon as we have (more weapons), as soon as there are enough of them, believe me, we will immediately retake this or that territory, which is temporarily occupied,” Zelenskyy told an evening news conference in the Kyiv metro.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has not confirmed any travel plans for Blinken and Austin. The State Department and Pentagon declined to comment.

Peace talks stalled

Zelenskyy reiterated on Saturday that Kyiv would withdraw from peace negotiations with Moscow if Russian forces kill Ukrainians trapped in Mariupol or hold pseudo-referendums in the areas they captured in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, he also said he supports a diplomatic solution to the conflict with Russia.

“There is a diplomatic path. There is a military one,” Zelenskyy said, adding he wants to stop the conflict and put an end to it.

The first talks between Russia and Ukraine took place in Belarus on February 28, with no breakthrough, followed by rounds of face-to-face or online negotiations between the two sides in Belarus and Turkey in March.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on April 12 that peace talks with Ukraine had hit a dead end, accusing Kyiv of derailing the talks by staging what he said were fake claims of Russian war crimes and by demanding security guarantees to cover the whole of Ukraine.

In a phone call with European Council President Charles Michel on Friday, Putin said that Kyiv was showing it was not ready to seek mutually acceptable solutions and he accused the Ukrainian side of being “inconsistent” in the negotiations.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Friday sounded a downbeat note about the peace talks.

“They have now stalled because our latest proposal that was handed to the Ukrainian negotiators some five days ago and formulated taking into account the comments we received from them remains unanswered,” Lavrov told a briefing.

However, Zelenskyy said he had neither seen nor heard about it.

After making some apparent progress in March, the atmosphere around the peace talks soured over Ukrainian accusations that Russian troops carried out atrocities in a town near Kyiv as they withdrew from the area.

Russia has denied the accusations, saying they were designed to derail peace efforts and serve as a pretext for more Western sanctions against Moscow.

Russia’s chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky confirmed on Friday that “several long conversations” had been held with Ukraine but he gave no details. It remains unclear whether the two sides can revive their faltering peace efforts.

A woman from Mariupol looks out the window of a bus after a convoy of vehicles arrived at an evacuation point, April 21, 2022. /CFP

UN: Number of refugees tops 5 million

Over the past two months, Ukraine has seen “suffering, devastation, and destruction on a massive scale,” said UN Crisis Coordinator for Ukraine Amin Awad on April 21. Awad echoed UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in saying, “We must stop the bloodshed and destruction.”

“At least 15.7 million people in Ukraine are now in urgent need of humanitarian assistance and protection,” said Awad during a press conference in Lviv, west Ukraine.

“This represents more than 25 percent of the entire population of Ukraine.”

By April 20, the number of people fleeing Ukraine had passed 5 million in Europe’s worst refugee crisis since the end of World War Two, the UN refugee agency said.

The conflict has triggered a massive displacement of people in the two months since it began, including more than 7 million Ukrainians within the country. UN data showed that 5.03 million people had fled Ukraine as of April 20.

China has put forth a six-point initiative on preventing a large-scale humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, including ensuring the protection of civilians and supporting the UN’s coordinating role in channeling humanitarian aid. The country has also provided batches of humanitarian supplies to Ukraine.

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