Talking points
- US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin urged allies to move swiftly to help Ukraine fight off Russia.
- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres met Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin’s long table to discuss evacuations from Mariupol.
- For the second day, explosions rocked the separatist region of Transnistria region, heightening fears the war will “spill over”.
- Russian forces hit the Azovstal steel plant with 35 airstrikes over 24 hours, despite Putin’s earlier orders to halt attacks.
Pokrovst, Ukraine: The US defence chief urged Ukraine’s allies to “move at the speed of war” to get more and heavier weapons to Kyiv as Russian forces rained fire on eastern and southern Ukraine amid new fears the fighting could spill over the country’s borders.
For the second day, explosions rocked the separatist region of Transnistria region in neighbouring Moldova, knocking out two powerful radio antennas. And a Russian missile hit a strategic railroad bridge linking Ukraine’s Odesa port region to neighbouring Romania, a NATO member, Ukrainian authorities said.
Just across the border in Russia, an ammunition depot in the Belgorod region was burning early Wednesday after several explosions were heard, the governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said on the messaging app Telegram. Early this month, Russia said two Ukrainian helicopter gunships hit an oil reservoir in the same region, causing a fire.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, sat at his long table with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to discuss evacuations from Mariupol. Credit:Sputnik
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and Russian President Vladimir Putin met one-on-one on Tuesday, Moscow time, for the first time since Russia invaded Ukraine, and the United Nations said they agreed on arranging evacuations from a besieged steel plant in the battered city of Mariupol.
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the Russian leader and UN chief discussed “proposals for humanitarian assistance and evacuation of civilians from conflict zones, namely in relation to the situation in Mariupol”.
They also agreed, he said, that the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross should be involved in the evacuation of civilians from the Azovstal steel complex where Ukrainian defenders in the southeastern city are making a dogged stand.
During the meeting, which the UN said lasted nearly two hours, Putin and Guterres sat at opposite ends of a long white table in a room with gold curtains bordered in red. No one else was at the table.
Women cooking in the entrance of a damaged apartment in Mariupol, which has been without heating or power since the first week of the war. Credit:AP
Guterres criticised Russia’s military action in Ukraine as a flagrant violation of its neighbour’s territorial integrity and urged Russia to allow the evacuation of civilians trapped at the steel mill.
Putin responded by claiming that Russian troops have offered humanitarian corridors to civilians holed up at the plant. But, he said, the Ukrainian defenders of the plant were using civilians as shields and not allowing them to leave.
Two months into the fighting, Western arms have helped Ukraine stall Russia’s invasion, but the country’s leaders have said they need more support fast.
US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin convened a meeting of officials from about 40 countries at the US air base at Ramstein, Germany, and said more help is on the way.
US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin speaks during the Ukraine Security Consultative Group meeting at Ramstein air base on April 26, 2022. Credit:Getty
“We’ve got to move at the speed of war,” Austin said.
He said he wanted officials to leave the meeting “with a common and transparent understanding of Ukraine’s near-term security requirements because we’re going to keep moving heaven and earth so that we can meet them”.
After unexpectedly fierce resistance by Ukrainian forces thwarted Russia’s attempt to take Ukraine’s capital, Moscow now says its focus is the capture of the Donbas, the mostly Russian-speaking industrial area in eastern Ukraine.
In the town of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region, people fleeing the shelling lined up Tuesday to board a train headed to the far west of the country. One person was lifted onto the train in a wheelchair, another on a stretcher.
The passengers took with them cats, dogs, a few bags and boxes, and the memory of those who did not flee in time.
A woman weeps on the evacuation train in Pokrovsk.Credit:AP
“We were in the basement, but my daughter didn’t make it and was hit with shrapnel on the doorstep” during shelling on Monday, said Mykola Kharchenko, 74. “We had to bury her in the garden near the pear tree.”
He said his village, Vremivka, was under heavy fire for four days and all but destroyed. With tears in his eyes, Kharchenko said he somehow held himself together at home, but once he reached the train station he fell apart. In a flash of anger, he lashed out at Russia.
“Is this liberation? From whom am I, a Russian speaker, from whom am I being liberated? From whom? From my daughter? From everything I have built during my whole life?”
In the gutted southern port city of Mariupol, authorities said Russian forces hit the Azovstal steel plant with 35 airstrikes over 24 hours. The plant is the last known stronghold of Ukrainian fighters in the city. About 1,000 civilians were said to be taking shelter there with an estimated 2,000 Ukrainian defenders.
Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to Mariupol’s mayor, said Russia was using heavy bunker bombs. He also accused Russian forces of shelling a route they had offered as an escape corridor from the steel mill.
Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of the Donetsk region of the Donbas, said on the Telegram messaging app that Russian forces “continue to deliberately fire at civilians and to destroy critical infrastructure”.
Ukraine also said Russian forces shelled Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city, which lies in the northeast, outside the Donbas. But it is seen as key to Russia’s apparent bid to encircle Ukrainian troops in the Donbas from the north, east and south.
Ukrainian forces struck back in the Kherson region in the south.
The attack on the bridge near Odesa — along with a series of strikes on key railroad stations a day earlier — appeared to signal a major shift in Russia’s approach. Until now, Moscow has spared strategic bridges, perhaps in hopes of keeping them for its own use in seizing Ukraine. But now it seems to be trying to thwart Ukraine’s efforts to move troops and supplies.
The southern Ukraine coastline and Moldova have been on edge since a senior Russian military officer said last week that the Kremlin’s goal is to secure not just eastern Ukraine but the entire south, so as to open the way to Transnistria, a long, narrow strip of land with about 470,000 people along the Ukrainian border where about 1,500 Russian troops are based.
It was not clear who was behind the blasts, but the attacks gave rise to fears that Russia is stirring up trouble to create a pretext to either invade Trasnistria or use the region as another launching point to attack Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the explosions were carried out by Russia and were “designed to destabilise,” with the intention of showing Moldova what could happen if it supports Ukraine.
Austin, the US defence secretary, said the US was still looking into blasts and trying to determine what was going on, but added: “Certainly we don’t want to see any spillover” of the conflict.
AP
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