– by Oleksandr Khozhukar
BERLIN/Lviv (Reuters) – German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier rules out normal Western relations with Russia as long as President Vladimir Putin is in power.
On Tuesday on ZDF, Steinmeier called Putin a “bunkered warmonger” who would accept the “total political, economic, moral ruin of the country” for “his imperial dreams or for his imperial madness.” Steinmeier admitted mistakes in dealing with Russia. According to a media report, the Ukrainian and Russian governments are continuing to negotiate. Later in the day, the UN Security Council was due to deal with ongoing allegations of war crimes by Russian soldiers. The Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj should be involved.
Steinmeier acknowledged that after 2014 warnings from Eastern European partners should have been listened to more. This includes the fact that the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline through the Baltic Sea should have been stopped. The implementation happened after the annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea by Russia. “Therefore, the detention was certainly a mistake.” The project cost Germany a lot of criticism and credibility with Eastern European partners. However, Steinmeier rejected the accusation that it had been clear for decades how Putin would develop. The Russian President of 2022 is not the same as that of 2001: “Something happened on the route.”
SATELLITE PICTURES ARE TO SHOW DEAD BODIES
The Ukrainian ambassador in Berlin, Andriy Melnyk, called Steinmeier’s admission a first step. Now the Federal President must persuade the government to impose stricter sanctions, said Melnyk on Deutschlandfunk, referring in this context to the reports of massacres by Russian soldiers. These included stricter sanctions such as an energy embargo and the exclusion of all banks from the Swift international payment system. Ukraine and western countries accuse Russian soldiers of having committed atrocities against civilians in the Kiev suburb of Bucha, among other places. Russia rejects this. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said of the evidence presented for the alleged crimes: “They were fabricated for a lot of money.”
The commercial satellite operator Maxar Technologies presented images that are said to have shown bodies during the Russian occupation. In an email to the Reuters news agency, the company said these showed that the dead had been lying on the streets for weeks. Reuters reporters in Bucha saw several bodies that appeared to have been shot at close range. It was not possible to determine who was responsible for the killings.
According to a Russian media report, negotiations between Russia and Ukraine continued intensively via video link. The Interfax news agency referred to the Russian Foreign Ministry. According to Zelenskyy, there may not be any direct talks between him and Putin. However, there is no alternative to negotiations. According to an EU spokesman, the head of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and the EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, want to meet in Kyiv in the course of the week.
In a televised address that morning, Zelenskyy said his country needed security guarantees because Russia could return in two years. In the coming decade, Ukraine will become a kind of “big Israel” where defense is the top priority, he announced.
Meanwhile, the course of the war continued to focus on the east and south. The government in Kyiv says it expects around 60,000 Russian reservists to be deployed in the east. According to Zelenskyy, the situation in the besieged southern Ukrainian port of Mariupol was “very difficult”. Several attempts by the International Committee of the Red Cross to evacuate civilians have been unsuccessful in recent days.
According to the British Ministry of Defence, Ukrainian forces have recaptured important areas in the north of the country. Russia was forced to withdraw from areas north of Kyiv, it said, citing military intelligence. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said nearly 20,000 Russian soldiers had died in Ukraine since the February 24 invasion. He did not provide any evidence. By way of comparison, the United States lost around 2,500 soldiers in the two-decade war in Afghanistan, according to data from Brown University.