As Russia pressed on, President Biden on Friday sternly warned his counterpart in China not to help Russian President Vladimir Putin by sending him weapons. During the nearly two-hour phone call, Biden threatened Chinese leader Xi Jinping with “consequences if China provides material support to Russia in its brutal attacks on Ukrainian cities and civilians,” according to a White House statement.
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But it is unclear whether China intends to heed the warning. In its reading of the cable, Beijing criticized the sanctions imposed by the West on Russia, noting that “ordinary people are suffering from indiscriminate sanctions” and that further measures “will provoke serious crises in the global economy … the already difficult global economy is even worse.”
Of particular concern was the strike on an aircraft repair plant near Lviv airport, despite no recorded deaths. Today, a city in western Ukraine, about 43 miles from the Polish border, considered relatively safe. Humanitarian workers, as well as diplomats who remained in the country, have gathered here to continue their activities, providing services to a significant share of more than 3 million Ukrainians fleeing the country.
Governor of the Lviv region Maxim Kozitsky told reporters on Friday that two rockets fired at the city were shot down, crediting the country’s air defense systems.
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“This is an attack on the city of Lviv, on a humanitarian hub, where at least 200,000 internally displaced persons are now,” Kozitsky said in a video message. “The attack on the city of Lviv once again confirms that [the Russians] They are not at war with the Ukrainian army, they are at war with the population, children, women, IDPs.”
Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyy wrote on his Telegram channel that there were no casualties immediately, and work at the facility was suspended prior to the attack.
Throughout central and eastern Ukraine, Russian troops are besieging many of Ukraine’s largest population centers. On Friday, the United Nations said 816 civilians had been killed and 1,333 injured since the start of the Russian invasion, while noting that those numbers likely underestimated the true extent of casualties.
The Mariupol City Council stated that more 80 percent of the houses in the city were damaged by Russian attacks, while Washington Post journalists saw evidence that cluster munitions, which were banned in many countries, hit center of Kharkov.
The standoff continues in Kyiv, the capital, where a Russian convoy still stands on the outskirts of the city and successive strikes on civilian structures appear to be designed to “wear the city down,” according to a senior US defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity in accordance with the basic rules of the Pentagon.
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According to the mayor of the city, Vitali Klitschko, the strike in a residential area of Kyiv, which resulted in a large crater near a kindergarten, killed at least one person and injured 19 others, including four children. Video of the aftermath of the strike, which was verified by The Washington Post, shows firefighters and soldiers providing assistance as people sift through the rubble in an attempt to salvage property from their homes. The preschool was badly damaged, with windows broken and part of the roof collapsed.
Protection the official noted that Russia still has more than 90 percent of its combat power the country gathered in Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has spent much of this week pleading with Western allies to help Ukraine by supplying the country with more powerful weapons. weapons to protect the country’s airspace from Russian attacks. The Biden administration has so far dismissed his calls for a NATO-imposed no-fly zone or assistance in the transfer of Soviet-made MiG-29 warplanes, arguing that such actions would either provoke a wider war with Russia, a nuclear weapons partner. power, or be ineffective due to Russia’s ability to shoot Ukrainian warplanes out of the sky.
Instead, the administration is considering sending Soviet-made S-300 anti-aircraft missile systems. Such a weapon will give Ukraine the ability to hit high-flying Russian bombers from a greater distance than US Javelin and Stinger missile systems. delivers to Ukraine. Ukrainians too are already familiar with the S-300 system – and if such material should have fallen into the hands of Russia, no American technological secrets will be revealed.
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But supplying Ukraine with such weapons is highly dependent on the participation of the few Eastern European NATO members who still possess them, including Slovakia, Bulgaria and Greece. This week, the Slovak defense minister announced his readiness to help “immediately” on the condition that other NATO allies replenish or supplement their stockpiles of defensive missiles.
This week, Germany said it would deploy Patriot missile systems to Slovakia, which could help transfer S-300s to Ukraine. But Putin has repeatedly threatened military consequences for any country that facilitates the shipment of military equipment to Ukraine. In an interview with RT, a Kremlin-backed channel, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday that anyone sending military equipment to Ukraine would be considered a “legitimate target,” according to an ABC News report.
The Kremlin spent Friday resurrecting debunked accusations against the United States as Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations went to the UN Security Council for the second time in a week to accuse the United States of running a biological weapons program in Ukraine. The US has denied these accusations, a common refrain in which Russia seizes on the existence of Ukrainian research labs that study biological pathogens and infectious diseases and receive US funding to claim the existence of a biological weapons program.
Putin spent the day building support at home by holding a rally at Moscow’s massive Luzhniki stadium, which was used for the 2018 FIFA World Cup final. Thousands of people gathered to wave flags and listen to Putin’s speech in honor of the eighth anniversary of the annexation of Crimea. Russia seized Crimea, a peninsula on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, in a largely bloodless but internationally condemned referendum in March 2014 after Ukrainians ousted the pro-Russian president in a popular uprising.
The Russian president, who has acted at arm’s length even from his closest advisers, appeared on stage praising Russia’s war against Ukraine as a just attempt to stop “neo-Nazis and extreme nationalists” committing “genocide” in Ukraine – an outlandish statement. he repeated, despite the fact that the president of Ukraine is Jewish. Putin’s claims are further complicated: Russian troops launched the most brutal attacks on eastern Ukrainian cities, mostly Russian-speaking, in a modern reflection of the shared history of the two countries. About 11 million Russians have relatives in Ukraine.
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The surprise was Putin’s video broadcast. The speech was cut short in mid-sentence by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov later saying it was a technical problem. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sparked a wave of resistance, including an army of hackers hoping to disable Putin’s war machine. There was no direct evidence that such efforts were behind the interruption of Putin’s speech. But there was no event a strong show of support that seemed like many of those present were civil servants who were forced to attend.
“We have to go to all these events. We can’t say no. This is out of the question,” said Moscow social worker Lena, who declined to give her full name for fear of losing her job. “I hate it all and am very afraid. We were told that if we did not go, this time it would be very strict. No explanations are accepted. We would have been fired immediately.”
Russia’s increasingly menacing posture, coupled with a rising civilian death toll in Ukraine, complicates the prospects for a peace deal to end hostilities. Negotiations are ongoing, but mostly stuck on a few points.
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First, whether Ukraine will agree to give up NATO membership. aspirations and take a position of “neutrality” or non-alignment with either the East or the West. Another question is whether Kyiv will agree to recognize Crimea as belonging to Russia and the independence of the eastern self-proclaimed separatist republics of Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Ukraine has long objected to what it sees as a violent partition of the country, despite years of Kyiv fighting and failing to establish de facto control over the provinces.
The most difficult of Moscow’s demands on Kiev may be Putin’s insistence on “demilitarization” in the absence of any credible security guarantees backed by the international community. The people and leaders of the country are still burned that the last time they made such an agreement was in 1994, when Kyiv agreed to give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for promises to respect its sovereignty — promises that Russia broke.
Demirjian and Nakashima reported from Washington. Faiola reported from Miami. Cheng reported from Seoul. Annabelle Chapman in Warsaw; Lily Kuo in Taipei, Taiwan; Miriam Berger in Jerusalem; Helier Cheung and Adela Suliman in London; Miriam Berger, Michael Birnbaum, John Farrell, John Hudson, Hannah Knowles, Attar Mirza, Carly Domb Sadof and Karen DeYoung of Washington contributed to this report.