UKRAINE WRAP | Ramaphosa accepts invitation from President Zelensky to visit Ukraine 'once conflict is over'
Image: REUTERS/Chingis Kondarov
April 22 2022 - 18:40
Ramaphosa accepts invitation from President Zelensky to visit Ukraine - 'once the conflict is over'
President Cyril Ramaphosa on Friday said he was willing to make a visit to war-torn Ukraine. This after President Volodymyr Zelensky extended an invitation to him during their phone call on Wednesday evening.
But, Ramaphosa said he will do so “once the conflict is over”.
The president shared details of his much anticipated call with Zelensky which came after the fifth session of the SA-Botswana binational commission in Pretoria.
April 22 2022 - 13:00
Kyiv has called for urgent talks to save the lives of the fighters and civilians
President Vladimir Putin said Russia has “liberated” Ukraine’s Mariupol, apart from the massive Azovstal steel plant, which he ordered blockaded. Kyiv has called for urgent talks to save the lives of the fighters and civilians in the city; limited civilian evacuations went ahead Wednesday and are expected to continue.
The situation in Ukraine’s east and south remains difficult, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in his address to the nation Wednesday night, as Russian forces push on with stepped-up ground and air offensives. Moscow claimed it hit 1,001 targets overnight.
Russia’s central bank governor said further rate cuts are possible. Finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of Seven nations say they want to isolate Russia from the global economy for its unprovoked “war of aggression.”
Reuters
April 22 2022 - 12:38
Russia pushes offensive, collects corpses in 'liberated' Mariupol
Russia pressed its new offensive in eastern Ukraine on Friday while in the port city of Mariupol, teams of volunteers collected corpses from the ruins after Moscow declared victory there despite Ukrainian forces holding out.
Ukraine's general staff said Russian forces had increased attacks along the whole frontline in the east of the country and were trying to mount an offensive in the Kharkiv region, north of Russia's main target, the Donbas.
Russia says it has won the battle of Mariupol, the biggest fight of the war, having taken a decision not to try to root out thousands of Ukrainian troops still holed up in a huge steel works that takes up much of the centre of the city.
April 22 2022 - 11:30
Kremlin: no change to timetable on rouble payments for gas
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday that there have been no changes to Russia's timetable for making foreign companies pay for gas in roubles following Britain's decision to grant Russia's Gazprombank a licence for gas payments until the end of May.
Peskov said all the timings for the payments were set out in Putin's presidential decree at the end of March, and settlements should be carried out in line with that order.
On Monday Peskov said there was still time for so-called "unfriendly" countries to switch to payments for gas in roubles that fall due in May.
Reuters
April 22 2022 - 10:27
EU has frozen €35 billion in assets over Russia’s invasion
European Union countries froze €35 billion ($39 billion) of assets in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine during the first 5 1/2 weeks of the war, with France topping the list, having frozen goods and capital worth €23.5 billion.
Germany, the EU’s largest economy, trailed France, seizing assets worth €341,600, according to a European Commission assessment dated April 5, the most recent such evaluation. The week following this assessment, Berlin impounded Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov’s superyacht Dilbar, which was valued at $600 million to $750 million.
The majority of the French allocation -- €22.8 billion -- involved Russian central bank funds. In the days following Russia’s February. 24 invasion, the EU banned all transactions with the central bank in an effort to isolate Moscow’s economy and financial system. Russia has about $640 billion in reserves.
The decision to hit the central bank was a first for an economy the size of Russia’s, and was an attempt to starve Moscow of cash and deprive monetary policymakers of the hard currency needed to support the ruble in the foreign-exchange market. It was also seen as a way to potentially limit Russia’s ability to finance its war.
April 22 2022 - 07:43
Ukrainian fighters hold on as Putin claims victory in Mariupol
Ukrainian fighters were clinging to their last redoubt in Mariupol on Friday after Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed victory in the biggest battle of the war, declaring the port city "liberated" following weeks of relentless bombardment.
The United States, however, disputed Putin's claim and said it believed Ukrainian forces still held ground in the city. Putin ordered his troops to blockade a giant steel works where the Ukrainians are holding out, having refused an ultimatum to surrender or die.
Ukraine said Putin wanted to avoid a final clash with its forces in Mariupol, as he lacked troops to defeat them.
April 22 2022 - 06:30
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT - Daughter's horror as shopping trip ends her father's life
Victor Gubarev had stepped out to buy bread when he was killed by a fragment of a shell in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. His daughter found an ambulance crew standing over his body minutes later
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April 22 2022 - 06:15
The art of wartime: Ukraine invades the Venice Biennale
Less than an hour after VIPs filed into Venice’s Giardini to view the opening of Venice’s 59th Art Biennale, a lone man in a dark overcoat unfurled a sign in front of an empty building normally used by Russia to show art. The sign read, in part: “I AM STANDING HERE IN FRONT OF THE RUSSIAN PAVILION AGAINST THE WAR AND AGAINST RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT CULTURAL TIES.”
He was quickly surrounded by a phalanx of Italian policemen who blocked the sign and then had him roll it up.
Speaking over the shoulders of the police officers, the man identified himself as Vadim Zakharov, a Russian artist who showed his work in the pavilion in 2013. “I think at least, people should be thinking about what they’re doing now, when Russians are bombing women and kids,” he said. “Propaganda may be more dangerous than bombs. Bombs kill some people, but propaganda kills millions.”
After answering questions from reporters, Zakharov, who now lives in Berlin, walked into the crowd. An hour later, looking slightly dazed, he bumped into one of the journalists and gestured dismissively at the throngs of expensively dressed people wandering through the Venetian garden. “Nobody wants to think about bad things,” he said.
April 22 2022 - 06:10
PATRICK BULGER | Ukraine: A false dawn for globalisation’s Age of Aquarius
Appalling scenes that bear testimony to the brutality of Russia’s war in Ukraine play out on our TV screens with numbing routine now. We witness the tragedy of ordinary people, their livelihoods and the lives of their loved ones extinguished in the molten-metal fury. It’s heartbreaking stuff, a bitter wake-up for those who had imagined Europe would never again experience the misery that attended World War 2. But history has caught up with modern Europe and the world. Globalisation’s Age of Aquarius has met its match.
Viewing the conflict in Ukraine in humanitarian terms is an appropriate civilised response, but where TV excels at packaging glimpses of shocking happenings, by its nature it does less well in perspective and context, especially beyond its own ideological confines. The biggest “back room’’ story of this war is what it says about the state of our world, and where we are, or thought we were, in what many took for granted as the natural evolution of political society. Assessed honestly, it’s self-deluding to view the war as anything but a train smash for globalisation. It may take decades just to remove the wreckage.
April 22 2022 - 06:00
Mariupol’s last stand: how the city has become the 21st century’s Thermopylae
Azovstal is a giant steel plant in Mariupol, the city in eastern Ukraine that Russian forces have pounded into submission and, in effect, extinction. In it, a couple of thousand Ukrainian troops, sheltering a smaller number of civilians, have held out under constant Russian bombing and attacks.
On Thursday, President Vladimir Putin declared that Russia had seized Mariupol and ordered his defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, to call off the storm of Azovstal, saying it would save the lives of Russian troops. “Seal that industrial area off so that even a fly can’t get through,” he said, calling on the Ukrainian troops there to surrender.