Ukraine cannot be conquered “house by house,” UN SecretaryGeneral Antonio Guterres warned on Tuesday, calling for the fighting to stop and “peace to be given a chance.”
“You can’t win this war” He claimed in statements to journalists made at the world organization’s headquarters in New York that “sooner or later they will have to move from the battlefield to the peace table.”
“It is time to stop this absurd war, the bombing of hospitals, schools, homes and shelters,” he said and warned “Ukraine cannot be conquered city by city, street by street, house by housepictured the city of Mariupol, which was bombed and badly destroyed by Russian forces.
Guterres felt that the war was “going nowhere fast”.
Adding to the “hell Ukrainians are experiencing — 10 million people have been displaced in less than a month of conflict — “the reverberations are being felt around the world with food, energy and fertilizer prices due to the looming clouds around one trigger the world hunger crisis, he warned.
This Wednesday, a special session of the UN General Assembly was convened by a group of countries, the 11th since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began on February 24. A new resolution on the humanitarian consequences of the conflict, proposed by Mexico and France, is expected to be put to the vote.
On March 2, 141 countries voted in favor of another resolution condemning the Russian invasion, with 35 abstentions (including China, Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Bolivia, India, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan or Pakistan) and five against (North Korea, Syria, Belarus, Eritrea and Russia itself).
The current project is opposed by Russia and several of its allies, who do not want the country’s name to appear in the text as it “politicizes” the country.
A European diplomat, who asked not to be identified, told the press on Monday that it was necessary to “isolate Russia” and that countries like “China” were “distancing” from Moscow, which last week voted on another draft resolution on the humanitarian situation gave up in the Security Council without support.
Ukraine is gaining ground well
Despite coming under heavy fire from Russia for more than three weeks, the Ukrainian military has begun to turn the pulse of the battlefield in some areas to regain ground from the invading forces, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said on Tuesday.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told CNN: Ukraine’s resistance, backed by millions of dollars in military aid from Western powers, was unexpectedly bitter and now the Ukrainians are repositioning themselves “in some places and partly on the offensive”.
“They are chasing the Russians and driving them from places where they were before,” he pointed out, particularly in Mikolayiv, a city in the south of the country that defends access to the important port of Odessa. “We’ve seen that increase in the last few days now,” he said.
Moscow’s indiscriminate military strikes have devastated several Ukrainian cities since it invaded its eastern European neighbor with tens of thousands of troops on February 24.The number of civilians is increasing and more than ten million people have fled their homes according to various reports.
Many analysts still do not see a clear way out of the conflict.
However, Kirby said he could not confirm reports from Ukrainian government officials that his forces had retaken at least one town and are expected to take more in the coming days.
But it would be “consistent with the type of fight and the types of skills that we’ve seen in the Ukrainians,” he said.
As for the Russians, Kirby agreed with Western analysts who said the invading forces had stalled.
“You’re running out of fuel. You’re running out of food. They don’t integrate their operations in the way one would expect a modern army to,” said Kirby, who felt the Russians were “frustrated.”
In this sense, the official stressed that “they were slowed down. And part of that…is due to his own ineptitude.”
With information from AFP.
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