Ukraine war front stabilizing as Russian offensive bogs down
Moscow/Lviv, Mar 23 (EFE).- Almost a month after it invaded Ukraine with tens of thousands of troops, Russia still does not control any of the country’s big cities that it thought it could seize rapidly, and the war front has stabilized in the face of ferocious resistance by the Ukrainian armed forces.
“Over the past day the location of the adversary and the character of his actions … did not change significantly,” the adviser to the Ukrainian presidency, Oleksii Arestovich, said by way of confirming the minimal advances of Russian forces.
Although the Russian army controls several mid-sized cities like Beraidnsk, Melitopol and Kherson, where local protests against the occupying forces are still being staged, it has been halted at the outskirts of Kyiv, Chernihiv and Kharkiv, which it is continuing to pound ever more heavily with missiles and artillery fire.
The government in Kyiv on Wednesday told the World Trade Organization that the Russian invasion has caused economic losses of at least $575 million to Ukraine so far.
In the southeastern part of the country, the Black Sea port city of Mariupol, the greatest symbol of Ukrainian resistance, has been enduring more than two weeks of harsh fighting and bombardment and more than 100,000 local residents have been trapped there in terrible conditions while the two sides accuse one another of preventing them from escaping via humanitarian corridors.
The slowdown in the Kremlin’s military operations in Ukraine were highlighted by the United Kingdom’s Defense Ministry on Wednesday, which said that Russia seems to be “reorganizing” its forces in northern Ukraine before resuming “large scale” offensive operations.
In the eastern Donbass area, Russian forces advanced just two kilometers (1.2 miles) during the day, according to the latest report from the Russian Defense Ministry.
The Pentagon confirmed on Tuesday that Ukrainian forces began counterattacking the Russians, especially in the south, instead of devoting themselves to defensive combat operations, but the Ukrainian General Staff said that its forces were continuing defensive operations in the southeast and northeast.
Kyiv is accusing Russia of assorted violations of the rules of warfare, including using white phosphorus, a banned substance under the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention.
Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Wednesday accused the United States of trying to prolong the Kremlin’s so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine as much as possible by supplying weaponry to Kyiv.
He also warned NATO against the eventual deployment of peacekeeping forces in Ukraine, as proposed by Poland, predicting that this would provoke military clashes between Russian troops and the Atlantic Alliance.
EFE int-mos/bp
