IRPIN, Ukraine, April 1 – Russian gas continues to enter Europe on Friday despite President Vladimir Putin’s cut-off deadline unless customers start paying in rubles, a powerful Moscow threat to retaliate against new sanctions for its attacks. Ukraine.
Negotiations aimed at ending the war were set to resume via a video link, in which Ukrainian forces made further progress on the offensive that drove the Russians out of Kyiv and broke siege to other cities in the north and east.
After failing to capture one of Ukraine’s largest cities in five weeks of war, Russia says it has shifted its focus to the southeast, where it has supported separatists since 2014.
The area includes the port of Mariupol, the epicenter of the war, where the United Nations believes thousands of people have died in more than a month under Russian siege and bombings.
The Red Cross had hoped to begin evacuating the city on Friday in a series of first aid kits, but Ukraine said Russia had blocked buses from reaching it on Thursday.
Western sanctions imposed by the war have cut off Russia from major world trade, but the alternative has been recorded with oil and gas.
Putin signed an order setting a Friday deadline for buyers from “unfriendly” countries to pay for gas in rubles or be cut off, a requirement that Western customers have rejected as an attempt to re-sign contracts demanding euros. Germany, the world’s largest consumer, called it “blackmail”, and warned this week of a possible emergency.
But there were no signs of disruption at the time on Friday. Flow remains stable at two of the three main ports that bring Russian gas to Europe – Nord Stream 1 across the Baltic Sea, and Slovakia over Ukraine.
Flowing through another major route, the Yamal-Europe pipeline over Belarus, had reversed direction, now bringing gas from Germany to Poland, but this happened occasionally and did not reflect a new policy.
Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned gas giant, said it was continuing to supply Europe with Ukraine in line with consumer spending declining since Thursday.
A source told Reuters that some of the contracts included pre-paid gas delivery, which suggested that the taps may not be shut down immediately.
‘ETERNAL FEAR’
Putin sent troops on February 24 for what he called a “special military operation” to end the war in Ukraine.
View shows Gazprom’s Bovanenkovo gas field
View showing gas sources at Bovanenkovo gas station owned by Gazprom in the Arctic Yamal peninsula, Russia May 21, 2019. REUTERS / Maxim Shemetov / File Photo
Western nations call it an unrepentant violent war and say that Putin’s real goal was to overthrow the Ukrainian government in a failed campaign so far, because of Ukraine’s strong resistance and Russia’s instability.
Irpin, a passenger terminal in northwest Kyiv that was once one of the main battlefields for weeks, has now returned to the hands of Ukraine, a remote area infested with burnt tanks.
Volunteers and paramedics were carrying the dead on a stretcher out of the wreckage. About a dozen bodies were wrapped in black plastic zippers, lined up on the road and loaded onto vans.
Lilia Ristich was sitting in a metal playground with her young son Artur. Most of the people had fled; and they sat down.
“We were scared to leave because they had been shooting all day since day one. It was bad when our house was hit. It was horrible,” he said. He lists the slain neighbors – a man “buried in the grass”; the couple and their 12-year-old child were burned alive.
“By the time our army arrived I was well aware that we had been released. It was an unimaginable joy. I pray that all this will end and that they will never return,” he said. “When you hold a baby in your arms it is a constant fear.”
Ten days ago, Ukrainian troops recaptured areas near Kyiv, breaking the Sumy siege to the east and repatriating Russian troops advancing to Mykolaiv in the south.
According to the latest developments in Ukraine, the British Ministry of Defense said on Friday that Ukrainian troops had recaptured the villages connecting Kyiv with the northern city of Chernihiv under siege.
In talks this week, Moscow said it would reduce attacks near Kyiv and Chernihiv in order to build trust in peace talks. Kyiv and its allies say Russia is withdrawing troops from those areas, not as a good deed but a reunification, because it has lost so much.
The Russians are still exploding cities even as they leave, and may be preparing for a major new offensive in the southeast, when they say they want to “liberate” the Donbas region wanted by separatists, including Mariupol.
Ukrainian workers say Russian troops began withdrawing slightly from the Kyiv region towards Belarus and were traveling in looted vehicles.
The gas station in the Russian city of Belgorod near the Ukrainian border was gutted by fire, and the regional governor said it had been hit by two Ukrainian helicopters in what, if confirmed, would be Ukraine’s first known air strike on Russian soil. The Ministry of Defense in Ukraine did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Russian oil company Rosneft, which owns the depot, reported the fire without disclosing the cause.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has warned of “impending wars” in Donbas and a city south of the besieged port of Mariupol.
“We still have to go through a very difficult journey to get everything we want,” Zelenskiy said. Learn more