Ukraine recaptured the city of Kherson from the Russians on Friday (11), a “historic day” according to president Volodymyr Zelensky, a feat hailed by the United States as an “extraordinary victory” this Saturday morning (12).
“The Ukrainians seem to have won an extraordinary victory: the only regional capital that Russia has won in this war, now again under the Ukrainian flag, that is remarkable,” said US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who attended the meetings in Cambodia. President Joe Biden attended the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit.
“Today is a historic day. We take back the south of the country, we take back Kherson,” the Ukrainian president said in his daily speech on social media on Friday night.
“Special forces are already in town,” he continued, adding that their first job would be to neutralize the large number of mines left by the Russian army, which has occupied Kherson since mid-March.
A video posted on Telegram by Volodymyr Zelensky and presented as coming from Kherson shows Ukrainian soldiers calling themselves the “28th brigade” being applauded overnight by a crowd chanting “VCU”, short for Ukrainian armed forces.
“The War Continues”
The foreign minister said on Saturday that Ukraine has “won battles on the ground, but the war continues”. “As long as the war continues and we see Russia mobilizing more troops and bringing more weapons to Ukraine, we will of course continue to count on her continued support,” Dmytro Kouleba said in a side-by-side meeting with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. said. From the meeting in Cambodia.
This Russian withdrawal is the third major withdrawal since February 24, when the invasion began. Recently, Russia had already given up taking Kiev in the face of fierce resistance from the Ukrainians, before being expelled from almost the entire Kharkiv region (northeast) in September.
This Friday night, on the emblematic Maidan square in Kiev, residents of Kherson, who have been refugees in the capital for months, celebrated the news with enthusiasm. Nastia Stepenska revealed, “Finally, my free city, the place where I was born, where I’ve lived all my life,” with her eyes filled with tears and her face painted in national colors. “When are they [os russos] It was horrible, we didn’t know what would happen the next day if we kept living,” the 17-year-old student said.
Earlier on Friday, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that it had completed the “redeployment” of its troops from the right (west) bank of the Dnieper River to the left bank, where the city of Kherson is located. must not be subject to any loss or abandonment of military equipment.
“The issue of the Russian Federation”
According to Moscow, “more than 30,000” Russian soldiers and “about 5,000 units of weapons and military vehicles” were withdrawn from the western bank of the Dnieper. The withdrawal was somewhat of a defeat for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who in late September demanded the annexation of four Ukrainian territories, including Kherson.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday that despite the withdrawal, the region will remain “a matter of the Russian Federation”. “There can be no change,” he added, in the Russian presidency’s first comment on this withdrawal.
Still in southern Ukraine, Vitaliï Kim, the governor of the Mykolaiv region, also announced on Friday night that he was “totally liberated”.
With the upcoming G20, the summit of world economic powers scheduled for next week in Indonesia, to which Vladimir Putin withdrew, the French presidency envisions the possibility of a dialogue. “There is very clear scope in the G20 to carry a message of peace and to ask Russia to engage in de-escalation logic,” said an adviser to French President Emmanuel Macron.
“A large majority in the club [do G20] “He finds this war too great and unbearable for the rest of the world,” he said.
“Weird Claims”
When asked about reports on Saturday that the Biden administration has begun to pressure President Zelensky to consider talks with Moscow, US adviser Jake Sullivan noted that Russia continues to have “strange claims” about self-proclaimed annexations.
“Ukraine is the side of peace in this conflict, and Russia is the side of war. Russia occupied Ukraine. If Russia chooses to stop fighting Ukraine and leave the country, that will be the end of the war. If Ukraine chooses to stop fighting and give up, it will be the end of Ukraine,” he argued.
“Our position remains the same in this regard and we are basically in close consultation with and support President Zelensky,” Sullivan said.
The Ukrainian president reiterated this week that the first condition for negotiations is the complete withdrawal of Russian troops that entered Ukraine on February 24.
(with information from AFP)
source: Noticias
