Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has lashed out at the EU and its foreign policy chief Josep Borrell as horror stories and images continue to pour out of Ukraine. Meanwhile, after about an hour and a half, the meeting between Vladimir Putin and Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer ended, and he said to the Tsar: “You are ending the war.”
“The statements made by EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell on Ukraine significantly change the rules of the game,” Lavrov said on Rossiya24 TV channel, recorded by Interfax. The reference is to Borrell’s words after his return from the Ukrainian mission in Kyiv about the “support” for Kiev and the strategy to be adopted in the next phase, in particular by providing Ukraine with “what it needs “. “These are guns. The war in Donbass, Borrell added, “is a trench warfare”. A support that even Stoltenberg says he wants to “consolidate”.
As Russia concentrates tens of thousands of soldiers for the new offensive that could decide the outcome of the conflict, proRussian separatists in Donetsk, Donbass, quoted by Tass, claim that “the port of Mariupol has been liberated”. . And Kyiv denounces that 33,000 residents of Mariupol were forcibly deported to Russia and the temporarily occupied districts of the Donetsk region, according to the reconstruction of Ukraine’s human rights commissioner Lyudmila Denisova in her Telegram channel, as reported by UNIAN.
In the occupied areas of the city, “a brutal crackdown on civilians is underway, carried out with the support of local collaborators,” Denisova said. “It makes all the difference to tell him face to face what the reality is: that this president actually lost the war morally,” Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg said ahead of the EU meeting in Luxembourg, in light of the “meetings between the Russian President Vladimir Putin and Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer today in Moscow. The meeting ended at the moment without explanations or press conferences. “It should he said be in his own interest that someone tells him the truth. I think it’s important and we owe it to ourselves if we want to save lives. We must seize every opportunity to put an end to the hellish situation in Ukraine”.
The UN has updated figures on the conflict: there have been at least 1,842 civilian casualties, including 148 children, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. This was announced by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (Ohchr) in its latest bulletin, adding that at least 2,493 were injured, including 233 minors. The UN agency emphasizes that the figures are underestimated in view of the difficulties encountered in the local investigations.
Russia says it has “adequate” gold and yuan reserves and will be able to return to growth, according to Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina, quoted by Bloomberg agency. The World Bank estimates the Russian economy at 11.2%. S&P classified its foreign currency debt as a “selective default after Moscow paid rubles, not dollars, for a bond due April 4. And Russia had already announced it would take legal action if it was declared bankrupt by the West, according to Finance Minister Anton Siluanov after the country was placed in “selective default by S&P. “We will go to court because we have taken all necessary steps to ensure investors receive their payments.”
China, on the other hand, has called for a fair and transparent investigation into the Kramatorsk incidents. The truth and the cause “of the accident must be established with a fair and transparent investigation,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, commenting on the missile attack on the railway station in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, which claimed the lives of over 50 people and who saw Moscow and Kyiv blaming each other. “Meanwhile, humanitarian issues should not be politicized and all allegations should be based on facts,” Zhao added.