WH SENDS ITS BIG GUNS TO KYIV
Blinken, Austin – but no Biden yet, prez says
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky revealed on Saturday that he will hold talks in Kyiv with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on Sunday.
The face-to-face meeting between Blinken (inset top), Austin (inset bottom) and Zelensky will be the first between the Ukrainian leader and Biden Cabinet members since Russia’s invasion began nearly two months ago.
“Tomorrow, the American officials are coming to visit us,” Zelensky said at a Saturday press conference in a subway station in the capital.
“We will be expecting, when the security will allow, the president of the United States to come and to talk to us,” Zelensky added.
“We will talk about the list of weapons that we need and the pace of its supply. In recent weeks, the pace, the number has all improved. I’m grateful for that.”
Surprise revelation
The White House declined to comment on Zelensky’s surprise announcement, which came a day after Blinken met with Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal in Washington, DC, on Friday.
That meeting was “further evidence that an independent, sovereign Ukraine is going to be around a lot longer than Vladimir Putin,” Blinken said at the time.
Zelensky called on the Russian president to also meet with him in person to negotiate an end to his bloody invasion.
“I think that whoever started this war will be able to end it,” Zelensky said.
But he vowed that Ukrainian negotiators would pull the plug on peace talks if Putin’s forces slaughter the last defenders of Mariupol who are holed up in the port city’s vast Azovstal steelworks.
“If our men are killed in Mariupol,” Zelensky said, “Ukraine will withdraw from any negotiation process.”
Ukrainian counterattacks have slowed Russian efforts to seize the eastern Donbas region, including the industrial provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk.
The Kremlin aims to secure “a land route between these territories and the occupied Crimea,” said the General Staff of Ukraine’s military.
Luhansk is suffering constant Russian shelling, the region’s governor, Serhiy Haidai, wrote on Telegram, with power lines and substations under heavy attack. Several towns were without water after a Russian shell hit a pumping station’s power plant.
Ukrainian forces repelled eight Russian attacks in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions over the past 24 hours, destroying nine tanks, 18 armored units, 13 vehicles, a tanker and three artillery systems, the General Staff reported.
Britain’s Ministry of Defense said that despite their increased activity in the Donbas, “Russian forces have made no major gains in the last 24 hours as Ukrainian counterattacks continue to hinder the efforts.”
In other developments:
■ Russia will deploy its new intercontinental ballistic missile by autumn, an official said. The Sarmat 2 missile, capable of carrying a large nuclear payload and hitting the US and Europe, will be a “historic” “superweapon” for the country, said Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Roscosmos space agency. The missile project, long plagued by delays, had its first successful test launch this week.
■ French and German arms makers sold $295 million worth of military hardware to Russia over the last seven years despite an embargo meant to block such sales, an EU report found. The manufacturers shipped rifles, bombs, rockets, torpedoes and thermal-imaging cameras by exploiting a loophole in the embargo, imposed after Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.
■ Other Eastern European nations will be in Russia’s crosshairs if Putin’s conquest of Ukraine succeeds, Zelensky warned Friday. “The invasion of Ukraine is only the beginning. Then they want to invade other countries,” he said.
Russian forces concentrated their firepower Saturday on Mariupol, raining airstrikes on the Azovstal steel plant that has served as the last bastion for the city’s defenders.
‘To see the sun’
The defenders released a video of women and children they said were sheltering in bunkers at the plant.
“We haven’t seen the sky or the sun” since Feb. 27, one girl says in the 10-minute clip, according to the BBC, which said the video could not be verified.
“We want to get out of here very much,” she adds. “We want it to be safe for us, so no one is hurt, and then live in safety.”
A boy says: “We’ve been here for two months now, and I want to see the sun.”
And a woman says: “We want to see peaceful skies. We want to breathe in fresh air. You have simply no idea what it means for us to simply eat, drink some sweetened tea.”
Soldiers from the Azov Regiment — the far-right-national-guard battalion that has joined Ukrainian military units in Mariupol — are shown offering fist bumps as the children greet them.
On Saturday, Russian forces resumed airstrikes on the metal plant and attempted to storm it, Ukrainian officials said.
“The enemy is trying to completely suppress resistance,” said Oleksiy Arestovich, a Ukrainian presidential adviser.
The assault appeared to signal a reversal of an order issued by Putin on Thursday to blockade the plant and starve its occupants into submission.
“There is no need to climb into these catacombs and crawl underground through these industrial facilities,” Putin had said in a televised meeting in which he declared victory in the fight for the Azov Sea port.
Meanwhile, a Ukrainian plan to evacuate some of the 100,000 civilians who remain in Mariupol was thwarted by Russian interference Saturday.
“About 200 Mariupol residents were going to leave,” the Ukrainian Parliament tweeted, “but when they arrived at the assembly point, the Russian military told them to disperse because ‘there will be shelling now.’ ”