Updated: 8.20am (AEDT)
Brussels, Belgium/Lviv/Mariupol, Ukraine
Reuters
Western leaders piled on military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine on Thursday with US President Joe Biden calling Russian leader Vladimir Putin a “brute” and Britain denouncing Moscow’s invasion of its neigbour as “barbarism”.
At an unprecedented triple summit in Brussels, transatlantic alliance NATO, G7 rich nations and European leaders addressed the continent’s worst conflict since the 1990s Balkans wars.
US President Joe Biden talks with France’s President Emmanuel Macron and Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson ahead of an extraordinary summit at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, on 24th March. PICTURE: Brendan Smialowski/ Pool via Reuters.
NATO announced new battle groups for four nations in East Europe, while Washington and London increased aid and expanded sanctions to new targets, including a woman London said was the stepdaughter of Russia’s foreign minister.
“This single most important thing is for us to stay unified and the world continue to focus on what a brute this guy is and all the innocent people’s lives that are being lost and ruined,” Biden told reporters in Brussels.
“Putin has already crossed the red line into barbarism,” added British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, saying the tougher the sanctions the sooner war would end.
The European Union was set to unveil steps to wean itself off Russian energy, something likely to drive up fuel costs even further around the continent. Moscow supplies 40 per cent of the EU’s collective gas needs and more than a quarter of its oil imports.
The measures stopped short of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s calls for a full boycott of Russian energy and a no-fly zone over Ukraine where Moscow’s bombs are wreaking havoc.
Responding to Thursday’s show of unity in Brussels, Moscow said the West had itself to blame for the war by arming the “Kyiv regime”.
The invasion unleashed on 24th February by Russian leader Vladimir Putin has killed thousands of people, sent 3.6 million abroad, smashed cities, and driven more than half of Ukraine’s children from their homes according to the United Nations.
“Turned to dust”
“A beautiful Mariupol used to be and suddenly it was turned into dust,” lamented 83-year-old Raisa Kairat in the besieged southern port that has become a wasteland under bombardment.
In Mariupol, which lies between Russian-annexed Crimea and eastern areas held by Russian-backed separatists, thousands are in basements with scant water, food, medicine or power.
People stand in a long queue during the distribution of humanitarian aid near a damaged store of wholesaler Metro in the course of Ukraine-Russia conflict in the besieged southern port city of Mariupol, Ukraine March 24, 2022. REUTERS/Alexander Ermochenko
In one part captured by Russian troops, a patch of grass between blasted buildings has become a makeshift graveyard. Freshly-dug mounds are marked with plastic flowers and crosses made from broken window frames.
Explosions sound in the background.
“It could have been me,” sobbed Viktoria as she buried her 73-year-old stepfather Leonid, killed when the car ferrying him to hospital was blown up.
In a month of fighting, Ukraine has fended off what many analysts had anticipated would be a quick Russian victory.
So far, Moscow has failed to capture any major city. Its armoured columns have barely moved in weeks, stalled at the gates of the capital Kyiv and besieging cities in the east.
They have taken heavy casualties and are low on supplies. Ukrainian officials say they are now shifting onto the offensive and have pushed back Russian forces, including north of Kyiv.
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Ukraine’s armed forces said they repulsed five Russian attacks in the country’s east on Thursday, destroying vehicles including tanks and killing up to 130 soldiers. Reuters was unable to corroborate the claim.
Ukraine also said its forces had destroyed the Russian landing ship the Orsk at the Russian-occupied port of Berdyansk.
Video footage, which Reuters confirmed was from Berdyansk, showed smoke rising from a blaze at a dock and the flash of an explosion. Russian officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Kremlin accuses NATO of an “hysterical and inadequate” understanding of events in Ukraine, a former Soviet Republic linked since the 9th century when Kyiv became the capital of the ancient state of Rus. Putin says NATO’s eastern expansion threatened Russia’s security and divided it from Ukraine.
Russia isolated again at UN
Ukraine’s armed forces chief of staff said on Thursday Russia was still trying to resume offensives to capture the cities of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkiv and Mariupol.
In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, hundreds have hunkered down inside metro stations deep underground to avoid Russian missile strikes and near-daily shelling.
One woman sheltering in the metro, Natalia Shaposhnik, said she knew Russians who did not believe that civilians have been shelled, despite the carnage of the past four weeks.
“I wrote to them [that] I’ve been sheltering with my child in the metro for a month and they don’t believe me. They say, ‘It is your own fault, you are to blame, it is you, you, you,'” she said.
At the UN, almost three-quarters of the General Assembly demanded aid access in Ukraine and criticised Russia for the “dire” humanitarian situation – the second time the body has overwhelmingly isolated Moscow over the invasion.
Smoke billows from a fire on what Ukrainian Ministry of Defence says is a Russian ship, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues, at the port of Berdiansk, Ukraine, on 24th March in this still image obtained from a social media video. PICTURE: Kirillovka.ks.ua/Handout via Reuters.
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, a Putin ally, posted on social media that Chechen fighters had captured the main administrative building in Mariupol and raised their flag there. His account could not be confirmed independently.
Satellite photographs from commercial firm Maxar showed massive destruction of what was once a city of 400,000 people, with apartment buildings in flames.
In the Russian-held part of the city, trucks arrived with food supplies in boxes bearing the “Z” symbol of what Russia calls its “special operation”. Hundreds of people, many elderly, emerged from ruins, queuing mostly in silence as men in Russian emergencies ministry uniforms distributed boxes.
Angelina, a young mother-of-two, said she had received bread, nappies and baby food. “It’s difficult to leave by bus now. We hope the number of people trying to get out will go down and it will get easier for us to leave,” she said.
– With reporting by a Reuters journalist in Mariupol, Ukraine, JOHN CHALMERS, MARINE STRAUSS, GABRIELA BACZYNSKA and SABINE SIEBOLD in Brussels, Belgium, and Reuters bureaux worldwide.
