As heads of government invite themselves to a deserted and shelled capital… Polish Prime Ministers Mateusz Morawiecki, Piotr Fiala of the Czech Republic and Janez Jansa of Slovenia traveled to Kyiv on Tuesday as representatives of the Council of Europe to reaffirm the Union’s “unconditional, equivocal support” with Ukraine.
There they were to meet in the evening with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the author shortly before this decisive statement: he announced the need to “recognize” that Ukraine will not integrate into NATO. He admitted eight days ago that his zeal for his country’s entry into the Atlantic Alliance had “cooled” because of the latter’s apparent lack of reciprocal appetite. Kyiv’s NATO membership has not made much progress since the Bucharest declaration in 2008 that Kyiv had a “call” to join one day.
The most important requirement
The solemn commitment of the Atlantic Alliance (which will hold a summit in Brussels on March 24 with the physical participation of US President Joe Biden) never to take Kyiv is one of the two most important demands of the Kremlin before the invasion of Ukraine. The second is the withdrawal of the troops of the western countries of the Alliance from the territories of the eastern countries that have become members since 1999 in connection with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact.
There is no guarantee that this statement by the Ukrainian president will be enough to lay the foundations for a peace deal. Kyiv is demanding $100 billion in damages for the destruction of its infrastructure. And Vladimir Putin, in his February 24 speech announcing the invasion, confirmed that he wants to “denazify” Ukraine, although he recently said that this does not mean regime change in Kyiv. The President of Russia is also clearly hatching a project to absorb Ukraine, since, he recalled on February 24, “Ukrainians and Russians actually constitute a single people,” within the framework of “one historical and spiritual space.”
Capital under siege
The delegation of the heads of government of Slovenia, Poland and the Czech Republic, the first at this level since the beginning of the invasion, is also seeking to “present a broad package of measures to support the Ukrainian state and society” on behalf of Europe. This delegation is all the more unusual because it includes a Slovenian head of government, who until recently was considered not very hostile to the Kremlin, another, a Pole, a Eurosceptic (but not pro-Kremlin for all that), and a third, a Czech, a Europhile. All three of the leading countries that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the 1990s, Ukraine submitted an emergency application for European Union membership last week, a procedure that usually takes many years to be confirmed…or not.
The capital, regularly shelled by Russian artillery and almost surrounded except for a corridor to the south, is under siege, an adviser to the Ukrainian president said. Russian rockets fired at the building on Tuesday morning killed two people. To combat Russian infiltration, a curfew was imposed from Tuesday evening to Thursday morning.
The Russian army continues to shell Ukrainian positions around the capital, as well as in Mariupol, a strategic port on the Sea of Azov, and Karkhov, the country’s second city, where most of the streets are now destroyed by buildings. . The various fronts had practically not moved for almost a week. Ukrainian airport “Dnipro” was bombed on Tuesday morning. Further west, bombs are raining down on Nikolayev, the last gateway to Odessa on the Black Sea. Russian warships were moving towards Odessa, perhaps in preparation for an amphibious assault.
[ 🇷🇺 RUSSIE | 🇺🇦 UKRAINE ]
🔸📍Kharkov, today.
— (Small) Think Tank (@L_ThinkTank) March 15, 2022
In addition, the Kremlin has imposed financial sanctions (freezing possible assets in Russia) on US President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.