“Peace talks with Ukraine are a dead end,”
said Russian President Vladimir Putin at a press conference on Tuesday. This statement came after Russia bombarded Ukrainian military positions and residential areas and unleashed rocket attacks while vowing to continue its invasion of the Ukrainian territories. The President was witnessed making a public promise stating that Russia would achieve all of its “noble aims” in Ukraine.
Putin targets US
In one of his first extended comments on the situation, Putin clearly stated that without an acceptable agreement, the Russian forces will continue their offensive. He also provoked the West for their incompetent efforts to bring Moscow to heel. Putin accused Kyiv of derailing peace talks by staging fake claims of Russian war crimes and exorbitant demands of security guarantees. The President asked the Western world to think about the destruction caused by the United States in the Syrian city of Raqqa as well as in Afghanistan.
“Have you seen how Syria was turned into rubbles by American aircraft?Decomposed corpses were lying in the ruins for months”
said Putin while targeting the US. He also accused the New World of turning a blind to all the destruction and devastation caused by the US over the years. He also drew parallels between the success of the Soviet Union’s Yuri Gagarin in space and the present-day defiance of Russia.
This was followed by several statements from the head of the Ukrainian delegation asserting that Kyiv’s position on peace talks remains unchanged. The chief Ukrainian negotiator Mykhailo Podolyak stated that the talks with Russia are extremely difficult and added that Russia is “sticking to its traditional practice of publicly pressing the negotiating process”. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky revealed that a pro-Russia politician and a very close friend of the Russian President had been detained after fleeing house arrest during the invasion.
After encountering heavy losses and its failure to capture the capital city of Kyiv, Russia is scaling back on its war agendas in Ukraine. There have been reports of the preparation of a new offensive, to solidify control of the Eastern Donbas region which is under the partial control of Kremlin-backed separatists. Putin accepted the downfall of the Russian economy as a result of the western sanctions and conceded that Russian logistics and payment systems suffered major losses. The Russian government is expecting economic losses and contractions of more than 10%, the worse in more than 2 decades.
Ease of sanctions for Russia?
Putin expressed that they don’t intend to be isolated from the world. “It’s impossible to severely isolate anyone in the modern world, especially a country as vast as Russia” stated the President. He said that he is hopeful that good sense will prevail in the western world, which would ultimately lead to ease of sanctions. He also mentioned that while the sanctions create the crisis in Russia, the inflation is inevitably going to severely affect all the major economies of the world and create widespread problems, especially for the common people.
In a later address on Tuesday, US President Joe Biden commented that Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine will amount to mass genocide. These comments were made by him during a speech at an ethanol plant in Iowa. When pressed to clarify his statement, he stood by the description and said
“Yes, I called it genocide because it has become clearer and clearer that Putin is trying to wipe out the idea of being able to be a Ukrainian”.
Casualties
The latest reports from the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights (UNHRC) state that over 1,800 civilians have been killed and approximately 2,500 since the commencement of the conflict in February 2022
Published by : Aditya Negi
Edited by: Khushi Thakur
