“NATO should stick to its promise not to expand eastward.” This explained the Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Le Yuchengechoing a topic of discussion in the Kremlin, saying that if “NATO expansion continued, it would get closer to the Moscow suburbs, where a missile could hit the Kremlin within seven or eight minutes. A big country, especially a nuclear power, would have an impact too bad to think about,” he said.
NATO should be disbanded and “consigned to history along with the Warsaw Pact,” he added. “Instead of crumbling, however, it has continued to consolidate and expand, intervening militarily in countries such as Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan,” he said, “the consequences of this path were well foreseeable. The crisis in Ukraine is a grave warning. He added that the US and NATO should engage in dialogue with Russia to address the heart of the Ukraine crisis and allay security concerns from both Moscow and Kyiv.
videos on this topic
Meanwhile, the conflict continues. On the 25th day of the war in Ukraine, Russian forces pushed deeper into besieged and battered Mariupol, where heavy fighting left hundreds of thousands of people stranded in extreme conditions without water, electricity or food. The port city’s fall would mark a major advance on the battlefield for Moscow, while its military has been largely bogged down outside of major cities for over three weeks. In the largest land invasion in Europe since World War II, Mariupol police officer Mikhail Vershnin said in a video aimed at Western leaders and confirmed by The Associated Press: “Children, old people are dying the earth”.
President Volodomir Zelenskyy remains determined to resist and in a new video accused his counterpart Vladimir Putin of starving Ukrainian cities to force them to surrender and warned that the invasion would take an equally heavy toll on Russia. He again asked Putin to meet: “It’s time to speak, it’s time to restore territorial integrity and justice to Ukraine.” On the eighth anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea (March 18, 2014), the Kremlin rejected the invitation to the sender. For Moscow’s chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky, a treaty “signed by foreign ministers and approved by governments” must be approved before considering “the possibility of a summit.”
Russia estimates that several thousand citizens have been killed in the conflict. Moscow also said it used the Kinzhal hypersonic missile for the first time in combat, destroying an underground weapons depot in the western IvanoFrankivsk region. Russia claims that the device has a maximum range of 2,000 km and a speed ten times faster than sound. The Pentagon has not confirmed the use of the missile, while Kyiv has only confirmed the raid on a missile and ammunition depot.
On the Ukrainian side, the open fronts are diverse. The United Nations confirmed the deaths of at least 847 civilians, including 64 children, and 1,399 injured. The number is certainly higher, the United Nations itself points out, while 3.3 million people have fled abroad. Areas recently affected include Kyiv suburbs such as Bucha, Hostomel, Irpin and Moshchun.
In Makariv, 50 kilometers from Kyiv, seven people were killed and five injured by a mortar shell, according to the police. And the number of missing remains unknown after Russian troops in Mariupol bombed a theater used as a shelter by hundreds of people, while 130 were rescued. A 38hour curfew was imposed in the Zaporizhia region after two rockets killed nine people and eight cities in the Donetsk region were attacked in the past 24 hours, including Mariupol itself, Kyiv said. Russia and Ukraine have agreed to set up 10 humanitarian corridors to bring aid to besieged cities and allow for evacuations.