Chris Lange, FISM News
A fourth round of talks between Ukraine and Russia is set to take place today by video link after previous talks led to little progress. The negotiations will center around facilitating a ceasefire, Russian troop withdrawals, and security guarantees for Ukraine, according to Ukrainian negotiator Mykhailo Podolyak, who also said that a ceasefire must happen before Ukraine agrees to return to the negotiating table.
“Negotiations. 4th round. On peace, ceasefire, immediate withdrawal of troops & security guarantees. Hard discussion,” Podylak said, adding that he believed Russia “still has a delusion that 19 days of violence against [Ukrainian] peaceful cities is the right strategy.”
The death toll on both sides continues to rise, with Ukrainian counterattacks and territorial defensive operations continuing to offer fierce resistance to the Kremlin’s advances.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he will continue to call for a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has yet to respond to the requests, according to an AP report. Zelenskyy said that daily talks are critical in establishing more humanitarian corridors to help civilians escape the Kremlin’s relentless and indiscriminate attacks in residential areas. Even though several agreed-upon evacuation routes were deliberately targeted by Russian troops over the past two weeks, some 130,000 people have been successfully evacuated from sieged areas within the past six days.
Zelenskyy paid a morale-boosting visit to a military hospital in Kyiv Sunday, smiling and talking to wounded soldiers. One image shows the president taking a selfie with a soldier whom he presented with a medal, while another captured Zelenskyy, outfitted in full PPE, speaking with another serviceman who was hooked up to several machines.
President #Zelensky visited #Ukraine's wounded soldiers in one of #Kyiv's hospitals. Together to the victory!#StandWithUkraine #StopWar #StopPutin #StopRussia pic.twitter.com/igLva0n5ec
— UATV English (@UATV_en) March 13, 2022
Zelenskyy continues to give nightly addresses from the capital, where he has vowed to remain and fight alongside his troops. The latest reports show Russian forces are now only 15 miles away from the city’s center. Multiple news outlets have reported that an apartment building inside the city had been struck Sunday, and intense fighting has taken place on the city’s outskirts, to the west, northwest, east and northeast.
Attacks also targeted nearby Irpin, where Russian forces fired on a vehicle with foreign journalists, killing American filmmaker Brent Renaud and wounding others.
Russia targets arms shipments from the U.S.
The Kremlin, meanwhile, broadened its attacks in western Ukraine over the weekend, including strikes on military depots receiving munitions from the West. Dozens of Ukrainians were killed in a Russian airstrike on a military training base near the Polish border following a warning by Kremlin Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov on Saturday that weapons shipments to Ukraine are “legitimate targets.”
“Russia has warned the United States about the consequences of the transfer of weapons to Ukraine,” Ryabkov said, according to Russian newswire RIA Novosti, as reported by Newsweek. This came after the U.S. Senate approved a $13.6 billion military and humanitarian aid package to Ukraine last week.
“Convoys of foreign weapons, which are thoughtlessly supplied to Ukraine, will be legitimate targets for the Russian Armed Forces,” Ryabkov added.
Russia also conducted roughly 30 missile strikes from the Azov and Black seas, killing 35 and injuring 134. Additional deadly overnight attacks also included strikes near Lviv, a culturally-significant UNESCO World Heritage site where Ukrainians have been prepping for attacks by piling sandbags around ancient statues in city streets and removing stained glass windows from some of its majestic cathedrals.
Other targeted areas included the southern city of Mykolaiv and Kharviv in the east. Explosions also rang out around the Russian-occupied Black Sea port of Kherson overnight. A 6th-century monastery in Lavra in eastern Ukraine, where over 500 refugees were sheltering, was also struck. Casualties, if any, have not yet been reported.
‘Kill me now!’ Tragic ending for pregnant woman, baby following maternity hospital attack
A pregnant woman and her baby both died tragically following last week’s bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol by Russian forces. Film crews had captured the moment the woman was rushed to an ambulance following the strike as she lay on a stretcher, stroking her bleeding abdomen in a scene that epitomized the brutality of Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s most vulnerable citizens and shocked the world. The woman was rushed to another hospital where doctors desperately worked to keep her alive. According to medics, when she realized she was losing her baby, the woman cried out “Kill me now!” before succumbing to her injuries.
Red Cross: Suffering in Mariupol ‘simply immense’
The International Committee of the Red Cross on Sunday said the humanitarian crisis in the port city of Mariupol continues to worsen, with hundreds of thousands of residents “facing extreme or total shortages of basic necessities like food, water, and medicine.” The organization reports that “Dead bodies, of civilians and combatants, remain trapped under the rubble or lying in the open where they fell” and said “life-changing injuries and chronic, debilitating conditions cannot be treated.” Mariupol’s capture would allow Russia to establish a land corridor to Crimea which the Kremlin seized from Ukraine in 2014.
Back at home, President Biden has dispatched National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to Rome to meet with a Chinese official amid concerns that Beijing is amplifying Russian disinformation and may be working with Moscow to mitigate punishing Western economic sanctions, according to an AP report.