Fierce fighting continues to be reported in Sievierodonetsk, the small eastern city that has become the epicenter of Russia’s advance and one of the bloodiest outposts in a war that has increased economic and physical hardship around the world. Chronic starvation could affect up to 19 million more people worldwide next year due to declining exports of wheat and other food products from Ukraine and Russia, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has said. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register In Ukraine, officials said they were concerned about the spread of deadly cholera and dysentery in the southern city of Mariupol, where tens of thousands of civilians are living in rubble captured by Russian troops last month following a relentless siege. In a video link to a conference in Copenhagen, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called for Ukraine to be accepted as part of the West with binding guarantees for its protection. “The European Union can take a historic step to prove that words for the people of Ukraine belonging to the European family are not just words,” he said, urging the European Union to accept Ukraine as a candidate. Visiting the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach said Germany would help build trauma centers for the wounded by donating prostheses and developing doctors, as Ukraine needed “humanitarian aid as urgently” as our military support. . But as the war in the east is now primarily an artillery battle in which Kyiv has been seriously launched from Moscow, Ukrainian officials say the current of events could only be reversed if the West fulfilled its promises to send more and better weapons. , including missile systems that Washington and others have promised. “This is an artillery war now,” Vadim Skibitsky, the deputy head of Ukraine’s military intelligence service, told Britain’s Guardian newspaper. “Everything depends on what it gives us (the West). Ukraine has an artillery of up to 10 to 15 Russian artillery pieces.” A local resident of Viacheslav walks on the rubble of a military-damaged apartment building as Russia’s attack on Ukraine continues in Sievierodonetsk, Luhansk, Ukraine, April 16, 2022. REUTERS / Serhii Nuzhnenko read more
BODIES CONTAMINATE WATER
Russia has rallied in a battle for Sievierodonetsk, hoping to occupy the entire territory of the eastern province of Luhansk, which Ukraine is demanding to hand over to the separatists along with the neighboring province of Donetsk – an area known as Donbas. uprising by separatist proxies since 2014. Ukrainian troops have largely withdrawn from residential areas of the city, but have not retreated to the east bank of the Siverskiy Donets River. Russian forces are also pushing north and south to try to encircle the Ukrainians, but so far they have made limited progress. Both sides say they have inflicted huge losses in the battle for the city. The Russian-controlled Ukrainian mayor of Mariupol, now operating outside the southern port after a nearly three-month siege that killed thousands, said thousands more could die of disease there. Russian occupation forces failed to properly dispose of the bodies in the city, which rotted in hot weather and rain, contaminating the water supply, Vadim Boichenko said. “There is an outbreak of dysentery and cholera … (which) will claim thousands of other Mariupolites,” he said. President Vladimir Putin launched what he calls his “special military operation” in Ukraine in February, claiming that his goal was to disarm and “search” for Russia’s neighbor. Kyiv and its allies call it an unprovoked offensive to seize territory. Ukraine said a speech by Putin on Thursday – drawing a parallel between what he described as a new quest to reclaim Russian territory and the historic achievements of Tsar Peter the Great – showed that Moscow’s goal was the conquest. “Putin’s confession of land confiscation and his comparison with Peter the Great prove: there was no ‘conflict’, only the bloody occupation of the country under fabricated pretexts of genocide,” Zelenskiy’s aide wrote on Twitter. Mykhailo Podolyak. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Additional reports from Reuters’s offices. Written by Peter Graff and John Stonestreet. Edited by Philippa Fletcher and Edmund Blair Our role models: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
