Ukraine denounces a new “wall” in Europe after three weeks of Russian invasion

Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky denounced on Thursday that Russia is erecting a new “wall” in Europe, “between freedom and slavery”, after his government accused Moscow of bombing a theater where civilians were refugees and on which the word “children”, visible from the air, had been written.

“It's not a Berlin Wall, it's a Wall in Central Europe between freedom and slavery and that wall gets bigger with every bomb” dropped on Ukraine, the leader said in a video message broadcast in the lower house of the German Parliament.

Zelenski addressed German parliamentarians a day after speaking to the US Congress, when he secured $1 billion of military aid from Washington, including Stinger surface-to-air missiles, such as those used against Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

“Dear Chancellor (Olaf) Scholz, destroy that wall, give Germany the leading role it deserves,” he told the German head of government.

This Thursday, Kiev, where the encirclement of Russian troops is narrowing, came out of a 35-hour curfew.

This Thursday morning, following one of the latest Russian attacks, AFP journalists saw a man, desperate, crouching next to a bloody body in front of an apartment block that had been hit by a rocket.

- “Children”, written on the roof -

In another video message released overnight, Zelenski urged Russia to a ceasefire, three weeks after an invasion began that led Western countries to impose harsh sanctions against Russia and its government, led by Vladimir Putin.

“If their war, the war against the Ukrainian people, continues, Russia's mothers will lose more children than in the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya combined,” she said, referring to the thousands of lives that those conflicts took.

On Thursday, the Russian Ministry of Defense denied having attacked the theater in the port city of Mariupol, in southern Ukraine, where local officials say there were “more than a thousand” refugees. According to the Renegé Human Right Watch, there were at least 500.

According to Moscow, the building was blown up by militants of the ultra-right Ukrainian group Azov Battalion, something that Westerners rejected, accusing Russia of generating disinformation.

Zelenski said that “the death toll is not yet known”, but that the attack shows that “Russia has become a terrorist state”.

According to satellite images of the theater taken on 14 March by the private company Maxar, on the front and back of the building, on the ground, the word “children” had been written in Russian.

The authorities published a photo of the building, with its central part completely destroyed and a white smoke emanating.

“The only word that describes what happened today is' genocide ', genocide of our nation, of our Ukrainian people,” denounced the mayor of Mariupol, Vadim Boyshenko.

More than 1,200 people died violently in Mariupol since the start of the war, according to Ukrainian sources. People who managed to flee the city describe a critical humanitarian situation and narrated that they had to drink melted snow and make fires to cook the scarce food they had.

“It got worse every day. We had no electricity, no water, no gas, no food. You couldn't buy anything anywhere,” a woman named Darya told AFP.

On Thursday, following this bombing, US President Joe Biden called Putin a “war criminal”, which caused great outrage in the Kremlin.

- “Purely economic?” -

On Thursday, Zelenski also reproached the Germans for years resisting breaking their economic ties, mainly in the energy sector, with Russia.

“Dear German people, how is it possible that when we said that Nord Stream 2 [a gas pipeline between Russia and Germany, whose entry into operation has finally been suspended by Berlin, ndlr] was a way of preparing for war, we heard as an answer that 'it was purely economic'?” , he wondered.

The German Chancellor applauded the Ukrainian president's “forceful words”, but did not respond directly to Zelenski's requests. “We are seeing it: Russia continues every day with its cruel war, with terrible losses,” he tweeted.

NATO has rejected Ukraine's requests to be directly involved in the conflict, for fear of unleashing a Third World War between two belligerents with huge nuclear arsenals.

For now, they have provided military aid and Joe Biden announced that the United States will also support Ukraine in acquiring new air defense systems.

In spite of everything Putin assured on Thursday, at a televised government meeting, that the operation is being carried out “successfully”.

The Russian leader also condemned the sanctions imposed by Western countries after his country was excluded from most of the Western financial system and assured that they failed.

On Thursday, the Kremlin rejected the order of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest court of the United Nations, to immediately stop its invasion of Ukraine.

In addition, the Russian Ministry of Finance stated that it paid interest of $117.2 million on foreign debt and avoided default for now.

Globally, war could cost world growth a point over a year if the effects on energy and financial markets endure, warned the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Europe will be the region most affected by the economic repercussions of the offensive, according to the organization.

- “Ukrainian model” -

More than three million people have fled the country, most of them women and children, according to the UN.

Zelenski said on Thursday that 108 children have died in the war.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said that a “compromise” could be reached to end the conflict if Ukraine agrees to become a neutral country, based on Swedish or Austrian models.

But the Ukrainian negotiator, Mikhailo Podolyak, pointed out that “the model can only be Ukrainian.”

The two sides negotiated via videoconference until Wednesday. Zelenski stressed in the last few hours that the priorities in the negotiation “are clear: end of the war, guarantees of security, sovereignty, restoration of our territorial integrity, real guarantees for our country, real protection for our country”.

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