© KEYSTONE/AP/Geert Vanden Wijngaert
US President Joe Biden travels to Poland near the Ukrainian border on Friday, rising to the front line of Western engagement against the invasion launched by Moscow. Militarily, the operation looks more and more like a war of attrition.
The situation of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, heavily bombarded, is still deteriorating. The mayor of Mariupol, Vadim Boychenko, advanced Thursday evening on Telegram a last assessment of 15,000 inhabitants taken “by force” to Russia on board buses, as well as “the confiscation of Ukrainian passports” of inhabitants stuck there.
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov says his paramilitary militia, which fights alongside the Russian army, has taken over Mariupol town hall. The information is impossible to confirm from an independent source. The Ukrainian army ensures that the city has not yet fallen.
fierce fights
The offensive continues elsewhere in the country, with deadly strikes on Thursday, notably in Kharkiv, the country’s second city. “The occupiers are trying unsuccessfully to reach the borders of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, to encircle the city of kyiv,” the Ukrainian army said overnight from Thursday to Friday.
“There were a lot of shots. They hit my house. The windows, the doors, the ceilings are destroyed,” Yaroslava Delichevska, 58, who fled with the family’s five dogs, told AFP. its outskirts of kyiv, transformed into a theater of fierce fighting.
The battle intensifies on the capital’s front, where Ukrainian rocket launchers respond to Russian artillery. “The enemy will probably try to resume offensive operations in the direction of the towns of Brovary and Boryspil in order to block kyiv from the east,” added the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in its latest bulletin.
The Ukrainian army also claims that in the Sea of Azov, the Russian ship “Saratov”, intended for a “landing” operation, “was destroyed during the attack on the occupied port of Berdiansk”. Two other Russian landing ships, the “Caesar Kunikov” and the “Novocherkassk”, were also “damaged”, according to kyiv.
Biden à Rzeszow
In his latest video posted on Facebook, overnight from Thursday to Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, entrenched in kyiv, pays tribute to “the heroic opposition of the Ukrainian people in the face of the Russian military invasion”.
In a month of war, thousands of Ukrainians have been killed, including 121 children, 6.5 million have had to leave their homes and more than 4,300 buildings have been destroyed, according to a latest assessment by President Zelensky.
In this context, US President Joe Biden is expected in the Polish town of Rzeszow, about 80 kilometers from the border with Ukraine, the second stage of his trip to Europe. Arriving from Brussels, he will be received by Polish President Andrzej Duda at the airport of this city located two and a half hours by road from Lviv, the main city in western Ukraine, where refugees are flocking.
He will then receive an update on “the humanitarian response to alleviate the suffering of civilians in Ukraine and to respond to the increasing flow of refugees fleeing the war that [le président russe Vladimir, ndlr] Putin has chosen,” the White House said.
A “response” from NATO
Joe Biden will meet American soldiers positioned in this region. These two days of visit to Poland come after an extraordinary diplomatic marathon in Brussels, where the American president has multiplied the summits – NATO, G7, EU – to praise Western unity in its response to Russia, a month to the day after the start of its invasion of Ukraine.
He promised for the first time a “response” from NATO in the conflict in Ukraine, if Russia used chemical weapons there.