RUSSIA,UKRAINE, UN: With the Ukraine war set to enter the third month, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is preparing to meet Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky next week. His face-to-face appeal to end the war comes just as Moscow plans to widen its war ambitions in southern Ukraine too, days after shifting focus from the capital city of Kyiv to the east.
The UN chief will visit Moscow to meet with Putin on Tuesday. “He hopes to talk about what can be done to bring peace to Ukraine urgently,” said UN associate spokesperson Eri Kaneko.
Guterres will then see Zelensky and Ukraine’s foreign minister on Thursday, two days after visiting Moscow, the United Nations said in a statement.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned that Russia’s invasion of his country was just the beginning and that Moscow has designs on capturing other countries, after a Russian general said it wants full control over southern Ukraine.”All the nations that, like us, believe in the victory of life over death must fight with us. They must help us, because we are the first in line. And who will come next?” Zelenskiy said in a video address late on Friday.
Meanwhile, according to the latest report by UN Migration Agency, over 7.7 million, 17 per cent of the country’s population, have been internally displaced since the beginning of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM), in its report, said that more than 600,000 additional people were internally displaced in Ukraine in the first 17 days of April.
The most pressing needs identified included cash and access to financial support, followed by medicines and medical supplies, reported IOM.
IOM Director General Antonio Vitorino said, “Women and children, the elderly, and people with disabilities have been disproportionately affected as they all represent a highly vulnerable group of people.”
Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials acknowledged on Friday that Russian forces had taken more than three dozen small towns in their initial drive this week to seize eastern Ukraine, offering the first glimpse of what promises to be a grinding brawl by the Kremlin to achieve broader territorial gains in a new phase of the two-month-old war.
The fighting in the east – along increasingly fortified lines that stretch across more than 482km – intensified as a Russian commander signalled even wider ambitions, warning that the Kremlin’s forces aimed to take “full control” of southern Ukraine all the way to Moldova, Ukraine’s south-west neighbour.
– THE HINDUSTAN TIMES,THE INDIAN EXPRESS, ANI, THE STRAITS TIMES