Russian officials have derided Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s wartime visit to the United States, claiming in several statements that his whirlwind trip to cement support in Washington proved he and his American allies were not “striving for peace” in Ukraine.
Mr Zelenskiy received thunderous applause from members of Congress during a hastily organised trip on Wednesday, his first known trip outside Ukraine since Russian troops invaded the country on February 24th.
Hours before the president’s arrival, the US announced a new $1.8 billion military aid package for Ukraine.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned that providing Mr Zelenskiy’s troops with more sophisticated weapons would not end the conflict, which has produced grinding though largely stalemated ground battles for territory and Russian air attacks on civilian power and water supplies.
Moscow did not hear “real calls for peace” during Mr Zelenskiy’s US visit, and thinks Washington is determined to “de facto and indirectly fight with Russia to the last Ukrainian”, Mr Peskov said. He also criticised Ukraine’s “barbaric shelling of residential buildings” in Russian-occupied areas of eastern Ukraine.
The Moscow-installed leader of Ukraine’s partially occupied Donetsk region reported that Ukrainian shelling of a hotel in the city of Donetsk killed two people and wounded several others on Wednesday night, including a former Russian deputy prime minister. On Thursday, a car bomb killed a Kremlin-appointed local official in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region, Russian state media reported.
The casualties demonstrated the high stakes and fierce fighting as Russia and Ukrainian forces battle for control of four regions that Russian president Vladimir Putin illegally annexed in September.
Russian state TV sought to downplay the military and political support Mr Zelenskiy has received in Washington, stressing in a news segment that not all members of Congress showed up to listen to his speech. Commentators also criticised the Ukrainian leader’s “casual attire” during his White House visit with president Joe Biden.
Russia and Ukraine held several rounds of talks in Belarus and Turkey early on in the war, and Mr Zelenskiy repeatedly called for a personal meeting with Mr Putin. The talks stalled after the last meeting of the delegations in Istanbul in March yielded no results.
After Mr Putin annexed the Ukrainian regions and declared martial law there, Mr Zelenskiy said he no longer was willing to negotiate with the Russian president. He stressed that one of the conditions for dialogue to begin would be the “restoration of (Ukraine’s) territorial integrity”.
Meanwhile, the White House said the Wagner Group, a private Russian military company, had taken delivery of an arms shipment from North Korea to help bolster Russian forces in Ukraine, a sign of the group’s expanding role in the conflict.
“Wagner is searching around the world for arms suppliers to support its military operations in Ukraine,” John Kirby, spokesman for the White House National Security Council, told reporters. “We can confirm that North Korea has completed an initial arms delivery to Wagner, which paid for that equipment. Last month North Korea delivered infantry rockets and missiles into Russia for use by Wagner.”
The US estimates that Wagner has 50,000 personnel deployed in Ukraine, including 10,000 contractors and 40,000 convicts recruited from Russian prisons. – Reuters