AT CROSSROADS
One of Zelenskyy’s top aides said the war would be over by May – and could even end within weeks – as Russia had effectively run out of fresh troops to keep fighting.
“We are at a fork in the road now: There will either be a peace deal struck very quickly, within a week or two, with troop withdrawal and everything, or there will be an attempt to scrape together some, say, Syrians for a round two and, when we grind them too, an agreement by mid-April or late April,” Oleksiy Arestovich said in a video.
“I think that no later than in May, early May, we should have a peace agreement, maybe much earlier: We will see,” Arestovich said.
The remarks projected a new-found confidence that Ukraine’s heavily outnumbered forces have made it impossible for Russia to achieve what Western countries believe was Moscow’s aim – to install in Kyiv pro-Russian leaders.
Russia says it is not targeting civilians and is carrying out a “special operation” to disarm and “denazify” Ukraine, which Kyiv and its allies call a baseless pretext to invade a democratic nation of 44 million people.
In the city of Rivne in western Ukraine, hundreds of miles from the combat zone, Ukrainian officials said 19 people had been killed in a Russian air strike on a television tower. If confirmed, that would be by far the worst attack so far on a civilian target in the northwestern half of the country.
Ukrainian and Russian delegations were due to resume peace talks later on Tuesday by video link.
So far no progress has been announced at those talks, which have focused on allowing civilians to evacuate and bring aid to surrounded cities, especially the eastern port of Mariupol.
Hundreds of people are believed to have been killed there since Russia laid siege to the city of 400,000 in the war’s first week.
Russian troops permitted a first column of cars to leave the city on Monday but attempts to enact a local ceasefire to bring in aid convoys have failed for 10 straight days. Ukrainian officials said they would try again on Tuesday.
While armoured columns bearing down on Kyiv appear to have been halted at the city’s outskirts, Russian forces have had more success in the south, capturing several small cities near the Black and Azov sea coasts.
In an intelligence update on Tuesday, Britain’s ministry of defence reported demonstrations against Russian occupation in the cities of Kherson, Berdyansk and Melitopol, with Russian troops firing warning shots to disperse crowds in Kherson. Russian forces were reported to have abducted the mayors of Melitopol and Dniprorudne, it said.
“NO WAR”
The war has brought economic isolation upon Russia never before visited on such a large economy. In Russia itself, it has been accompanied by a near total crackdown on free speech, with all major independent media shut down and Western social media apps switched off. Reporting that refers to “war” or “invasion” is banned.
In a rare anti-war protest during the main news programme on the main state TV channel, an employee stood behind the anchor and held up a sign in English and Russian that said: “NO WAR. Stop the war. Don’t believe propaganda. They are lying to you here.” She was quickly arrested.
The United Nations says more than 2.8 million people have now left Ukraine since the start of the war.
“I am fleeing with my child because I want my child to stay alive,” said a Ukrainian woman named Tanya who said she travelled from the town of Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine across the Danube river to Romania. “Because the people that are there now are Russians, Russian soldiers, and they kill children.”
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