Russia steps up fighting in Odessa
Israel angered by Lavrov’s Hitler claim
Fighting raged in the critical port city of Odessa and across Ukraine’s east as fresh evacuations of civilians from war-ravaged Mariupol were set to take place yesterday.
The United States was warning that Moscow is preparing to formally annex regions in the east, while the European Union told member states to brace for a complete breakdown in Russian gas supplies as it prepared a new package of sanctions.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov meanwhile sparked outrage by alleging Adolf Hitler may have “had Jewish blood”, invoking a conspiracy theory in a bid to discredit Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky — who is of Jewish ancestry.
Israel — which has sought to keep a delicate balance between the two sides since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — condemned the remarks and summoned Moscow’s ambassador.
Mr Zelensky also slammed Mr Lavrov’s remarks as “anti-Semitic”, and said they showed Russia had “forgotten all the lessons of World War II”.
“It is no coincidence that they are waging a so-called total war to destroy all living things, after which only the burned ruins of entire cities and villages remain,” he added.
The war has seen Moscow, after failing to take the capital Kyiv, shift its twomonth-old invasion to largely Russianspeaking areas and step up pressure on Odessa, a cultural hub that is a crucial port on the Black Sea.
Odessa’s city council said a Russian strike hit a residential building housing five people. A 15-year-old boy was killed and a girl was hospitalised, the council said on Telegram.
Russia’s invasion has killed thousands of people and displaced more than 13 million in a war the scale of which has not been seen in Europe for generations.
Among the most battered cities is Mariupol, where an untold number have died and survivors have little access to food, water and medicine as Russia battles to connect the southern and eastern strips of land under its control.
The city is now largely calm, AFP journalists saw on a recent press tour organised by Russian forces, apart from the muffled rumble of explosions coming from the direction of the Azovstal steel plant, the last holdout of Ukrainian forces in Mariupol.
Kyiv said more than 100 civilians were evacuated over the weekend from the sprawling Azovstal complex, where soldiers and civilians have been sheltering in a maze of tunnels.
The onslaught came as the United States warned that Moscow was preparing imminently to annex both Lugansk and Donetsk.
Pro-Russian separatists in the two regions declared independence in 2014, but Moscow has so far stopped short of formally incorporating them as it did that year with the Crimean peninsula.