Ukraine rejects plea from Macron
French president demands Moscow not be humiliated
As Ukrainian troops tried to claw back territory and stave off a blistering Russian assault along the country’s embattled eastern front, the government Saturday sought also to repel a demand earlier in the day by President Emmanuel Macron of France that Moscow not be humiliated to improve chances of reaching a diplomatic solution.
“We must not humiliate Russia so that the day when the fighting stops we can build an exit ramp through diplomatic means,” Macron, who has sought to position himself as the world’s chief negotiator with the Kremlin, said in an interview with French newspapers. “I am convinced that it is France’s role to be a mediating power.”
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba responded with a scathing post on social media.
“Calls to avoid humiliation of Russia can only humiliate France and every other country that would call for it,” Kuleba wrote. Instead, he argued, peace and the saving of lives could best be achieved by Russia being “put in its place.”
The exchange comes as the war has settled into what seems increasingly destined to be a slog.
The Ukrainians and Russians both said Saturday that they were inflicting decisive losses against each other in the battle for Sievierodonetsk, the last major city in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine still under Ukrainian control.
The British Defense Ministry said Saturday that Russia’s recent use of airstrikes and artillery
fire has been a factor in its limited success in Ukraine’s east. Russia’s reliance on long-range strikes has probably depleted the country’s stock of precision-guided missiles, leading to greater use of unguided munitions that can cause substantial civilian casualties, the ministry said.
Also Saturday, an airlaunched cruise missile hit the Odesa region on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, Odesa city officials said on the social networking site Telegram. The missile struck a mostly agricultural area with warehouses, injuring two people, according to the officials.
Odesa is home to Ukraine’s largest seaport and is vital to the country’s ability to ship grain and other
commodities.
Russian and Ukrainian officials also traded blame for the burning of the main temple of the All Saints hermitage, a 16th-century monastery in eastern Ukraine that is considered one of the three most sacred sites in Ukraine for Orthodox believers.
In a video address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of “deliberately destroying the Ukrainian culture and its historic legacy along with social infrastructure and housing — everything needed for normal living.”
Russia’s airstrikes have provided cover to their troops engaged in the fighting in Sievierodonetsk. Russian troops continued
to target the last remaining bridge into the contested city to keep Ukraine from moving reinforcements, food and medicine into a city that has become the focus of Russia’s war machine.
Despite its early and devastating setbacks, Russia has come to occupy one-fifth of the country.
The intensity of the Russian attack and frequency of Russian reinforcements to Sievierodonetsk led to predictions that the city would soon fall. But Serhiy Haidai, governor of Luhansk province — who recently had a dour prognosis for the city’s survival — said on national TV that Ukrainian troops had retaken 20% of the territory they had lost, adding that it was “not realistic” the city would fall in the next two weeks.
As Ukrainian forces try to take back territory in the east, its State Emergency Services has removed 127,393 explosive devices, with the efforts focused mostly on urban areas in the Kyiv, Sumy and Zhytomyr regions that were occupied by Russia early in the war, according to a report by the United Nations Development Program.
Russia’s retreat from those areas has made them more accessible for cleanup operations, the report said, adding that Ukrainians had covered an area of more than 11,000 square miles but that it could take years to clear all of the mines in Ukraine. Ukrainian forces have also launched a counteroffensive near the occupied city of Kherson in the country’s south.
But a punishing, costly and tragic military stalemate is increasingly foreseen by experts.
Ukraine has been outgunned but will soon receive long-range M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, commonly known as HIMARS, from the United States. The exchanges of ever more lethal firepower will likely add to the many millions of people who have already been displaced, a death toll of at least 4,000 civilians and a Ukrainian economy already in tatters with roughly $100 billion in losses.