The horrors of war in Ukraine will only get worse, several politicians warned yesterday.
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“There is every reason to believe it will get worse and many more people will die. […] It’s already a bloodbath, I think it will become even more a bloodbath,” lamented the Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, Chrystia Freeland in tightening sanctions against Russia yesterday.
She thus echoed French President Emmanuel Macron.
“The worst is yet to come,” he dropped earlier, just after his third telephone conversation with Russian leader Vladimir Putin since the start of the conflict.
The words exchanged had “nothing to reassure us”, because the latter “will continue his military interventions until the end”, then specified a source from the Élysée to CNN.
At the same time, the second round of talks between Russia and Ukraine did not yield the expected results for the second country, which was hoping for a ceasefire. Moscow and Kyiv have only agreed on humanitarian corridors, allowing the evacuation of civilians as well as the delivery of medicines and food in the areas of fire and bloodshed.
Call for help from Ukraine
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky renewed his appeal for help from the West yesterday, convinced that Russia would not stop taking his country.
“If we disappear, […] then it will be Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, etc. to the Berlin Wall, believe me,” he said, believing that the Kremlin might want to rebuild the entire European sphere of influence of the former USSR.
He also reiterated his request for NATO to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine to block Russian bombardments and reduce civilian casualties.
“And if you don’t have the strength to close the sky, then give me planes,” he exclaimed at a press conference reserved for foreign media in Kyiv.
Putin “no longer seems to aim simply to annex a few regions. Now it looks like he’s destroying the whole country. It’s kind of a war of mass destruction,” Georgia President Salome Zurabishvili told CNN.
Surrounded cities
Meanwhile, the noose is tightening around several Ukrainian towns which are surrounded by Russian forces who are constantly pounding them.
Strikes also increased the death toll by 33 in a residential area of Cherniguiv, northeast of the Ukrainian capital. And about 800 Russian vehicles were yesterday heading for the port city of Mykolaiv, near Kherson, which fell to the Russians on Wednesday.
This war “will probably last a long time,” said German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who said he “did not see any signs” indicating that this “war will end soon”.
– With Laurent Lavoie and AFP
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