The UN announced Antonio Guterres’ official visit to Kyiv during the night. The Secretary-General – said in a statement – will be in the Ukrainian capital next Thursday, April 28, two days after the meeting with Vladimir Putin already scheduled for Tuesday in Moscow. Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi is also planning a visit to Kyiv, probably before the trip to the United States planned for mid-May.
Meanwhile, in his message to the nation yesterday, Zelenskyy said Western partners had finally started supplying Kyiv with the weapons it really needs. “We have finally been heard” and Ukraine is getting “exactly what we asked for,” the Ukrainian president said, stressing that a Russian commander’s comments about the need to link up with Moldova show Moscow’s intention to invade other villages. In his video message, Zelenskyi also referred to Good Friday before Orthodox Easter. “Good Friday is coming to an end, one of the saddest days of the year for Christians. The day when death seems to have triumphed. But – he said – we hope for a resurrection. We believe in the victory of life over death. And that’s what we pray. “To lose death”.
Ukraine, in the building of the Kharkiv Regional Council
However, mass graves with hundreds of buried bodies keep coming to light as the days go by, especially in the Mariupol area. The last one, with over a thousand bodies, was found in the village of Vynohradne. “This is the biggest genocide in Europe since the Holocaust,” said Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boichenko. And on the day the Russian media admits but then cancels military casualties of 20,000 men, the Defense Ministry budget comes to the sinking of the Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, which was hit by Ukrainian missiles off the coast on April 13 from Odessa. According to official information from Moscow, which continues to speak of a fire on board, there is only one dead – a crew member -, 27 missing and 396 rescued. The sinking will instead be celebrated in Ukraine next May, when the Post Office will issue a new stamp dedicated to this episode, believed to be a turning point in the war.
On the front lines of the Kremlin sanctions and countermeasures, the European Commission, with Faq published ad hoc for European companies, explained that Russian gas payments can still be made in euros or dollars, despite the decree adopted by Moscow on March 31, according to which the existing contracts will only become after the conversion of amounts due into rubles. “EU companies can ask” Russia “to fulfill their contractual obligations as provided before the decree is passed or to deposit the amount due in euros or dollars,” it says.