Due to alleged little interest in Kiev to prolong the ceasefire regime, Russia resumed its offensive in Ukraine in the afternoon on Saturday, according to Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashénkov, quoted by Russian agencies.
“Russia decided to resume its offensive because Kiev showed little interest in influencing the nationalists and prolonging the ceasefire regime,” Konashenkov told reporters.
The Russian spokesman reported that the Ukrainian nationalist battalions took advantage of the ceasefire decreed by Russia to “regroup their forces and reinforce their positions.”
The announcement of a temporary ceasefire occurred to allow the opening of humanitarian corridors that allow the evacuation of the civilian population in the cities of Mariupol and Volnovakha, in eastern Ukraine – later postponed indefinitely due to the resumption of fighting -, and with the decision of important international media, including Agencia Efe, to temporarily cease their news production in Russia due to the threat posed to their journalists by the reform of the criminal code recently approved in Moscow.
On the other hand, the third round of negotiations between Ukraine and Russia will take place on Monday, announced a member of the Ukrainian delegation, David Arakhamia, on the tenth day of the Russian invasion.
“The third round of negotiations will take place on Monday,” Arakhamia wrote on his Facebook page.
Since the start of the Russian offensive in Ukraine on February 24, both countries have met twice, the first time on Monday, in the Gomel region of Belarus, close to the Ukrainian border, without much progress.
The second, on Thursday, on the border between Poland and Belarus, in the town of Belovezhskaya Pushcha, in the Belarusian region of Brest, according to Belarusian and Russian sources.
In this second round, the fighting was not stopped, but it was agreed to open humanitarian corridors for the civilian population.
IMF warns of devastating impacts
For its part, on the same day, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned that the already serious global economic impacts of the war in Ukraine unleashed by the Russian invasion would be “even more devastating” if the conflict intensifies.
“While the situation remains highly fluid and the outlook is subject to extraordinary uncertainty, the economic fallout is already very serious,” the IMF said in a statement after a meeting of its executive board on Friday. “
If the conflict escalates, the economic damage would be even more devastating.
The rise in energy prices and raw materials in general, with a barrel of oil now trading at around $120, adds to the rise in inflation that the world was already experiencing at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The jump in prices will have effects throughout the world, particularly in low-income households for whom food and energy expenses represent a greater proportion” of their budget than the average, the Fund advanced.
As for Ukraine, “it is already clear” that the country would have to face “significant” costs related to the revival of the economy and the reconstruction of totally destroyed or damaged buildings and facilities.
According to the IMF, the emergency financial assistance requested by Ukraine, and which the entity had reported on February 25, amounted to 1.4 billion dollars.
The request could be formally submitted to the IMF board “as early as next week,” according to Saturday’s press release.
Countries that have close relations with Ukraine and Russia are “particularly at risk of shortages and supply problems,” the IMF stresses.
Demonstrations against invasion continue
Meanwhile, the mass demonstrations to ask Russia to leave Ukraine continued this Saturday.
Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of various European cities to demand that Russia reverse its military invasion of Ukraine and end the war.
One of the most massive protests was the one held in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia -a member country of the EU and NATO- and in which the ambassador of the invaded country, Vasilj Kirilic, participated, who highlighted, addressing the demonstrators with a speech for which he was applauded, that “this is not war, it is genocide.”
Another of the most popular protests took place in Latvia, where more than 30,000 people demonstrated in its capital, Riga, to condemn the devastating invasion.
In Rome, tens of thousands of people mobilized, called by the Italian Network for Peace and Disarmament, in a national march that filled the center of the capital with rainbow-colored flags calling for the end of the war and the dialogue as the only means to achieve it.
Some 20,000 demonstrators, according to the police, and 50,000, according to the organizers, gathered in Piazza San Giovanni, an emblematic scene of the protests in Rome, after the march, led by a large multicolored flag, traveled several kilometers through the Roman center with the motto “Stop the war. For a Europe of peace”.
The Italian demonstration was attended by numerous state civil society organizations, including the country’s largest trade union, the CGIL, whose secretary general, Maurizio Landini, called for the UN’s intervention in the negotiations to stop the conflict.
In Zurich, the main city of the Helvetic Confederation, more than 40,000 people demonstrated, in addition to many others who took to the streets of Bern, Geneva and St. Gallen, mainly.
Under the slogan “Peace now”, the Swiss demonstrations highlighted calls for an immediate cessation of hostilities, the withdrawal of Russian troops and the holding of diplomatic negotiations that make it possible to stop the attacks.
In London, hundreds of people gathered in the central Trafalgar Square to protest the Russian invasion of Ukraine and demand an end to the war, many of them of Ukrainian origin living in the United Kingdom, who sang the national anthem during the protest of their country and chanted slogans such as: “Stop Putin, stop the war”.
Another act of great symbolism against the war was carried out in the French capital by the Ukrainian designer Lili Litkovskaya, who settled in the Tranoi fashion salon in Paris with a blue and yellow flag as a claim for other designers to mobilize on social networks and in the demonstrations in favor of his country, besieged by Russia.
Meanwhile, in Romania, thousands of Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion and seeking shelter in the neighboring country continued to enter through the Siret border, where a wave of solidarity has been unleashed and it is feared that the situation will worsen in the coming days.
Likewise, the United States again asked its citizens to leave Russia immediately due to the possibility of suffering “harassment” by Russian security forces, at a time of escalation in tensions between Washington and Moscow over the war in the east. European. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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