VGone are the days when Moscow made its citizens believe that the “military special operation” was going to be a walk in the park. Now the country is swearing in a long, bloody, existential struggle less with Ukraine and more with the West. The Defense Ministry spokesman on Thursday afternoon accused “western countries” of sending and arming “mercenaries” to Ukraine and criticized states like Denmark and Britain that allow their citizens to move to Ukraine and fight for the country.
According to the international law of war, the “mercenaries” are not to be understood as prisoners of war, the military emphasizes and threatens that “the best thing that awaits them” is criminal proceedings. The spokeswoman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs blames the bloodshed on “American secret services” who are completely indifferent to Ukrainians and who manipulate the “Kiev regime”.
A second round of negotiations with Ukrainian representatives took place on Thursday evening (this time not in the east of Belarus like last Monday, but in the west of the country), after which there was talk of “humanitarian corridors” and possible ceasefires. But official Moscow representatives such as Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are repeating the maximum demands that their president made at the beginning of the war.
According to the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin himself had an “open exchange of views” with the French President for about an hour and a half on Thursday, wanting to convince him that, contrary to what Emmanuel Macron had said, Ukraine was fighting “Nazism”. “In this context, argumentative explanations were given on the essential role of neo-Nazis in Kiev’s state politics,” it says.
Putin: Everything is going according to plan
Putin reiterated the goal of “demilitarization” and “neutral status of Ukraine” and “that the tasks of the special military operation will be fulfilled in any case”. According to the Kremlin, according to the Kremlin, if negotiations were delayed, they would only “make additional demands on Kyiv”. And contrary to the numerous reports of breakdowns, setbacks and, above all, numerous casualties among Russian soldiers in Ukraine, Putin asserts that the operation is “going according to plan”. The Russian armed forces are doing “everything possible to protect the lives of peaceful citizens”, using “highly accurate weapons” exclusively against military targets, and reports of shelling and bombing of Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities are false, are “elements of an anti-Russian disinformation campaign”. .
Daily at 12.00 p.m
In the evening, Putin will speak to his National Security Council over a video link. Russia’s soldiers acted “bravely, like real heroes,” he says; they fought “steadfastly, fully aware of the rightness of their cause”, showed “mass heroism”, wounded “sacrifice their lives to save their comrades-in-arms and peaceful inhabitants”. The troops also granted “corridors” to civilians in all combat zones, says Putin, in contradiction to the outcome of the negotiations in Belarus, but “nationalists” would not allow this.
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