Wednesday, March 27

Six countries including UK and US accuse Russia of war crimes in Ukraine | Russia


Russia has been accused by Britain, the US, France, Albania, Ireland and Norway of war crimes in Ukraine, as Paris claimed Vladimir Putin was only pretending to be interested in negotiating a peace deal.

The six nations challenged Russia before a UN security council meeting as the UK foreign secretary, Liz Truss, said there was now “very, very strong evidence” of war crimes being committed by Russian forces.

“Vladimir Putin is behind them,” Truss said. “It is ultimately a matter for the international criminal court to decide who is or isn’t a war crime and for us to bring the evidence.”

Rescue workers continued to search through the rubble for survivors of a Russian airstrike on a theater in the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol where hundreds of people had been sheltering.

Officials said more than 20 people were killed and 25 injured in an airstrike on a school and community center in Merefa, close to the north-eastern city of Kharkiv, in the early hours of Thursday morning.

Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s defence, minister, described the pilot who bombed the theater in Mariupol as a monster. The word “children” had been painted in large Russian script on the ground outside the red-roofed theater building to warn off fighter jets.

Speaking via video link to a committee of MEPs, Reznikov, who has been leading the Ukrainian delegation in peace talks with Russia, said the first step to any deal was an immediate ceasefire but he feared the Kremlin would first need to be defeated in battle.

“We will of course first of all during the negotiations talk about a ceasefire, about humanitarian corridors, the provision of the civilian population with evacuation, with water, with food, and maybe later we can sign this agreement for peace,” he said.

Also Read  Niño de 4 años se dispara fatalmente afuera de un supermercado Publix de Georgia mientras su madre compraba

“But on the terms of Ukrainian people – we would never accept any capitulation and our armed forces are ready to resist. So today we could say the negotiations are more or less on a technical level. And of course lawyers are involved, politicians are involved, and I’m not going to go into more details about negotiations.”

He added: “I have to assure you that there is nothing yet to be satisfied about. But I hope that we will end this war very soon and of course by defeating the Kremlin.”

Reznikov told MEPs that international leaders such as Israel’s prime minister, Naftali Bennett, had been trying to mediate. But there are major doubts within the Ukrainian negotiating team and in western capitals about whether Putin is prepared to choose peace.

France’s foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, said he believed the Russian president was intending to negotiate as part of a battle plan also used in Chechnya and Syria.

“Unfortunately, we’re still facing the same Russian logic – making maximalist demands, wanting Ukraine to surrender and intensifying siege warfare,” Le Drian told Le Parisien newspaper. “Just as in Grozny [in Chechnya] and Aleppo [in Syria]there are three typical elements – indiscriminate bombardment, so-called humanitarian corridors designed to allow them to accuse the other side of failing to respect them, and talks with no objective other than pretending that they are negotiating.”

Le Drian said there was only one way for Putin to show he was interested in peace and that he was by engaging with “one urgent matter – ceasefire, ceasefire, ceasefire.”

Also Read  Joe Rogan apologizes for repeated use of N-word after footage emerges | Joe Rogan

“Russia refuses that for now,” he said. “So the sanctions will be intensified in a determined way until Putin realizes that the price for continuing the conflict will be so high that a ceasefire is preferable and he starts real talks with President Zelenskiy.”

One western official said that while the Russian negotiators appeared to be serious about their task, Putin’s television appearance on Wednesday should be a cause for doubt. The Russian president spoke of a western plot to destroy Russia and described his domestic opponents of him as “traitors and scum”.

“The question of whether Russia is prepared to compromise on its demands is a very big question,” the official said. “Those of you who saw President Putin addressing the nation yesterday would be forgiven for thinking that Russia was not in a compromising mood.

“And in the end a lot of this is going to come down to what Putin wants… Negotiations are serious and are worth pursuing. But as he says, where and whether they will end up somewhere useful I think is still very unknown.”

Russia as been demanding that Ukraine become a “neutral state” and abandon its aspirations to join Nato. The Kremlin also wants Kyiv to accept the loss of Crimea, which Moscow illegally annexed in 2014, and the self-recognized regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Slovenia’s prime minister, Janez Jansawho saw Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv on Tuesday evening, told the Guardian that the Ukrainian president was open to changing the constitution to satisfy Russia’s demand on Nato but that Ukraine wanted iron-clad guarantees from world powers that they would intervene in any future conflict provoked by the Kremlin.

Also Read  Patria: qué pasó con la vacuna de México contra el Covid y por qué se retrasó

“If we want a real peace agreement, something which will last many generations, I don’t think that this is possible only to negotiate between Russia and Ukraine,” he said. “I think that at the same table, as guarantors, there should be United States, European Union and China.”

The US president, Joe Biden, is to hold a call on Friday with the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping. There were seven hours of talks on Monday in Rome between the White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and his Chinese counterpart, Yang Jiechi.

In Moscow, Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov accused Kyiv of failing to engage seriously in the talks. “Our delegation is putting in colossal effort and demonstrates more readiness towards them than the other side,” he said.


www.theguardian.com

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *