As another attempt to rescue residents from the besieged port city of Mariupol failed, Russia accused Ukraine of launching a cross-border helicopter attack on oil storage, talks to end the violence in Ukraine started on Friday.
The claimed airstrike by a pair of helicopter gunships created many fires and injured two persons, according to the governor of Russia’s Belgorod region. According to a Kremlin spokesman, the event on Russian soil could jeopardize negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian officials.
When asked if the hit could be seen as an escalation of the war in Ukraine, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov answered, “Certainly, this is not something that can be interpreted as establishing pleasant conditions for the continuation of the talks.”
It was unable to confirm whether Ukrainian helicopters attacked the oil station or whether many nearby companies in Belgorod were also struck. Russia has previously claimed shelling from Ukraine, including an incident last week that resulted in the death of a military chaplain, but not an airspace invasion.
When asked if Ukraine fired on the depot, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told reporters in Warsaw that he couldn’t “neither confirm nor deny the assertion that Ukraine was involved in this simply because I don’t have all the military facts.”
The new talks, which are being held via video link, came after a meeting in Turkey on Tuesday, during which Ukraine underlined its willingness to drop its NATO membership application and presented recommendations to have its neutral military status guaranteed by a number of nations.
Vladimir Medinsky, the leader of the Russian mission, stated on social media that Moscow’s positions on preserving control of the Crimean Peninsula and extending territory held by Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine “remain unaltered.”
The International Committee of the Red Cross said difficult logistics were still being worked out for the mission to bring humanitarian relief into Mariupol and people out of the city, which has been ravaged by weeks of severe combat and is running short of water, food, and medicine.
“We’re out of terms to express the tragedies that Mariupol civilians have endured,” ICRC spokesperson Ewan Watson said at a United Nations meeting in Geneva on Friday. “The situation is horrific and escalating, and allowing people to escape and relief supplies in is now a humanitarian priority.”
He claimed that the gang had dispatched three vehicles to Mariupol and a frontline between Ukrainian and Russian soldiers, but that two trucks bringing supplies for the city were missing. According to Watson, dozens of buses planned by Ukrainian authorities to transport people out had not yet begun to near the dividing line.
A short time later, city officials announced that the Russians had blocked the entrance to Mariupol and that it was too unsafe for citizens to leave on their own.
“We do not see a genuine intention on the part of the Russians and their satellites to create a possibility for Mariupol inhabitants to flee to Ukrainian-controlled area,” Petro Andryushchenko, a Mariupol adviser, stated on Telegram.
“Any humanitarian cargo, even in small amounts, is categorically not allowed into the city,” he said, adding that Russian forces “are categorically not allowing any humanitarian cargo, even in small amounts, into the city.”
Only 631 people were able to leave in private automobiles when Russian soldiers barred a 45-bus convoy aiming to evacuate civilians from Mariupol on Thursday after the Russian military agreed to a brief cease-fire in the area, according to the Ukrainian authorities.
According to Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk, Russian forces also confiscated 14 tons of food and medical supplies en route to Mariupol.
The city has witnessed some of the war’s most heinous atrocities. Thousands of civilians have been able to flee through humanitarian corridors in recent weeks, bringing the population down from 430,000 before the war to an estimated 100,000 by last week. Russian attacks, on the other hand, have regularly blocked assistance and evacuation attempts.
In recent days, the Kremlin has stated that its “primary goal” is now to seize complete control of the Donbas, where Mariupol is located, in what appears to be a shift in its military aims. The Donbas is a primarily Russian-speaking industrial region of eastern Ukraine where Moscow-backed separatists have fought Ukrainian forces since 2014 and declared two sections autonomous republics.
Russia is using its talk of de-escalation in Ukraine as cover to reorganize, replenish, and redeploy its forces for a stepped-up onslaught in the east, according to Western diplomats.
Despite Moscow’s announcement on Tuesday that it would halt military operations in certain areas, Russian soldiers have continued to bombard Chernihiv, a besieged city in northern Ukraine, and Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital.
According to the British Defense Ministry, Ukrainian forces have retaken the villages of Sloboda and Lukashivka, south of Chernihiv and along with one of the city’s main supply routes to Kyiv.
Ukraine has also launched successful but limited counter-offensives to the east and northeast of Kyiv, according to the ministry.
The fire at the oil storage “occurred as a result of an airstrike by two helicopters of the Ukrainian armed forces, which invaded the territory of Russia at a low height,” Belgorod governor Vyacheslav Gladkov posted on Telegram early Friday.
The Rosneft depot, some 35 kilometers (21 miles) north of the Ukraine-Russia border, is run by the Russian energy company Rosneft.
Separately, Energoatom, Ukraine’s state power provider said Russian troops left the extremely polluted Chernobyl nuclear facility in northern Ukraine early Friday after getting “substantial doses” of radiation while excavating trenches in the exclusion zone around the decommissioned reactor.
The International Atomic Energy Agency stated that it was unable to independently verify the claim of exposure. Energoatom did not provide any information about the troops’ condition or the number of people who were affected. The Kremlin remained silent for the time being.
The UN nuclear watchdog said it had received notification from Ukraine that Russian personnel at Chernobyl had handed over control of the world’s worst nuclear disaster to the Ukrainians in writing.
On Twitter, IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi said he will visit the decommissioned facility as soon as possible, adding that his organization’s “help and support” mission to Chernobyl “will be the first in a series of similar nuclear safety and security visits to Ukraine.”
Grossi was in Kaliningrad, Russia’s enclave, on Friday for talks with senior officials about Ukraine’s nuclear difficulties. According to the agency, nine of Ukraine’s 15 active reactors are currently in service, including two at the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhya plant.
Soon after entering Ukraine on February 24, Russian forces seized the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, increasing fears of damage or interruption that may spread radioactivity. The workers there are in charge of the secure storage of spent fuel rods as well as the concrete-encased debris of the 1986 reactor explosion.
Five weeks and one day into a conflict that has killed thousands of people and forced over 4 million people to flee Ukraine, there appeared to be little hope that the two sides would reach an agreement on their demands any time soon.
After a phone discussion with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday, Italian Premier Mario Draghi said the conditions weren’t “ripe” for a cease-fire and that he wasn’t ready to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky until the negotiators did more work.
Late Thursday, in his nightly video address, Zelensky expressed doubts about Moscow’s commitment to stop the conflict. He cautioned that Russian retreats in the north and center of the nation were merely a military ploy to build up strength in preparation for new attacks in the southeast.
“We know what they’re up to,” Zelensky said. “We know they’re shifting their attention away from the locations where we struck them in order to focus on other, more crucial areas where we might have a hard time.”
