President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Wednesday near Bakhmout, epicenter of the front and symbol of Ukrainian resistance in the east of the country, where he promised a military victory over "terrorist" Russia, the day after a call for peace launched without convincing from Moscow by the Chinese head of state Xi Jinping.
The declarations of the Ukrainian president, who came to reinforce his troops as close as possible to the fighting near Bakhmout, then in Kharkiv, a large city in the northeast, followed new deadly strikes by the Russian army. These claimed the lives of at least eight civilians in the Kiev region, and hit a residential building in Zaporijjia (center-east) head-on, killing at least one person and injuring dozens.
"We will definitely respond... to all attacks on our cities," Zelensky said in a video message.
“Here in the Donbass, in the Kharkiv region, wherever the Russian Evil has come, it seems obvious that this terrorist state cannot be stopped other than by our victory,” he added.
"Russia will lose this war," said the Ukrainian president.
Previously, Volodymyr Zelensky had posted a video on Telegram of his trip near Bakhmout, a city threatened with encirclement by Russian forces. We see him in a black sweater in a concrete hangar, with heavily armed soldiers to whom he gives medals.
His trip - the second to this part of the front where he had already visited in December - came just hours after Chinese President Xi Jinping left Moscow, following a summit the day before with Vladimir Putin. .
Displaying an alliance with the West, the limits of which he has scarcely defined with his Russian counterpart, the Chinese president has put on the table a plan for settling the conflict, which the Russian side has affirmed that it agrees to consider but that the West - United States in the lead - suspected that they could only consolidate Russian territorial gains.
The United States, which had warned Beijing against any delivery of weapons of war to Moscow, estimated on Wednesday that China had not at this stage "crossed the line" of these deliveries.
"I think the diplomatic, political, and to some extent material support (from China) to Russia is of course against our interest in seeing this war end," said Secretary of State Antony Blinken. in Congress.
In the immediate future, in Chassiv Iar, a small town west of Bakhmout, subjected to constant Russian bombardment, AFP journalists saw columns of Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles, in particular of British and French manufacture, speeding towards Bakhmout or returning, armed soldiers perched on the armor.
In the center of Chassiv Iar, a huge crater ripped through the courtyard of an apartment building. Further on, a school was destroyed.
Residents get into a minibus to flee. "We can't take it anymore. Our nerves are giving out," says a man, who is leaving town with his parents.
Earlier on Wednesday, Russia launched 21 Iranian-made Shahed-136/131 combat drones against Ukraine, an operation that began shortly before midnight, the Ukrainian Air Force said, claiming to have shot down 16 of them .
Besides sending these "killer Iranian drones", the Russians, according to this source, fired missiles, there were "numerous bombardments".
Eight people died and seven others were injured in Rzhyshchiv, about 80 kilometers south of Kyiv, in a drone raid that hit a vocational high school overnight Tuesday-Wednesday, according to a Facebook post from security services. Ukrainian emergency.
In another strike, at least one person was killed and 34 others injured, including three children, according to the rescue services, when "two Russian missiles" fell on an apartment building in Zaporizhia, in the center-east, according to a final report from the Ukrainian Ministry of the Interior.
The nuclear safety of the Zaporizhia power plant, occupied by the Russian army, is also in a "precarious state", warned on Wednesday the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Magnified.
The plant has been dependent for three weeks on power supplied by a single external line and its "last emergency power line", damaged, remains "disconnected and under repair", according to the IAEA press release. However, it allows it as a last resort to ensure nuclear safety and security, in particular by cooling its reactors.
Russia for its part assured to have "repelled" Wednesday an attack of marine drones on Sevastopol, the home port of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, in the south of Crimea.
Since the start of the offensive against Ukraine, Crimea, annexed by Moscow in 2014, has been the target of combat drones several times, without kyiv claiming responsibility for the attacks.
In his video message Wednesday evening, Volodymyr Zelensky promised the Crimean Tatars, a local Muslim community, that Ramadan which begins Thursday would be the last they would experience "under the threat of Russian repression".
Finally in The Hague, the legislative body of the International Criminal Court on Wednesday denounced "threats" emanating from Russia against members of the ICC after it issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin for the war crime of "deportation" of Ukrainian children.
23/03/2023 03:33:28 - Kiev (Ukraine) (AFP) © 2023 AFP
