A mother and daughter in Brovary, on the outskirts of Kyiv
(Picture: AP)Vladimir Putin has been accused of “military, diplomatic and KGB games” with a pledge to de-escalate his war near Kyiv as part of peace moves — as some Russian units were being forced to return to Belarus because they have lost so many soldiers.
Britain issued a strong warning not to “trust what is coming out of the mouth of Putin’s war machine” after Russian deputy defence minister Alexander Fomin said the Kremlin had decided to “radically reduce military activity in the Kyiv and Chernihiv directions” to boost trust at peace talks towards reaching an agreement to end the conflict.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, in a late-night address to the nation, said: “We are hearing positive signals from the negotiating table but positive signals do not silence the explosions of Russian bombs.”
On the ground, the governor of Ukraine’s northern Chernihiv region said he saw no let-up in Russian attacks despite the promise by Moscow to scale down military operations there. “Do we believe in it (the promise)? Of course not,” said Viacheslav Chaus.
“The ‘decreased activity’ in the Chernihiv region was demonstrated by the enemy carrying out strikes on the city of Nizhyn, including air strikes, and all night long they hit Chernihiv.”
Shelling could be heard outside Kyiv overnight but the Ukrainian capital itself was not shelled by Russian forces.
“The night passed relatively calmly, to the sounds of sirens and the sound of gunfire from battles around the city, but there was no shelling in the city itself,” said deputy mayor Mykola Povoroznyk.
On the 35th day of the invasion, the Kremlin was reported to be moving forces from northern to eastern Ukraine to try to encircle Ukrainian troops in the Donbas region, but to be keeping some behind near Kyiv to tie down part of the Ukrainian military there.
After Mr Putin’s plan to seize the capital within days failed, Russian troops were being forced to pull back in a number of areas after being hit with Ukrainian counter-attacks.
British defence chiefs said this morning that some units had even returned to Belarus and Russia, after suffering heavy losses, to regroup and resupply.
Justice Secretary Dominic Raab emphasised that the West would judge the Kremlin’s “de-escalation” by its actions rather than words.
“There is obviously some scepticism that it will regroup to attack again rather than seriously engage in diplomacy,” he told Sky News.
“The door to diplomacy will always be left ajar but I don’t think you can trust what is coming out of the mouth of Putin’s war machine.” Oleksandr Danylyuk, a former national security adviser to President Zelensky, warned that Russian forces were likely to be “regrouping” and that they were “not going to ease their grab on Kyiv and Chernihiv”.
Mr Danylyuk accused former KGB officer Mr Putin of a “trick” with the “de-escalation” announcement, which he believes is aimed at allowing the Russians to accuse Ukrainian forces of breaching the peace step if they carry on seizing back territory.
“There is always this military, diplomatic, and KGB games are all combined,” he told the BBC.
“This is just one game, a new strategy of Putin to use negotiation just to move to the next stage of the attacks.”
Russian forces are shelling nearly all cities along the frontline separating Ukrainian government-controlled territory from areas held by Russian-backed separatists in the eastern Donetsk region, its governor said this morning.
Pavlo Kyrylenko said the situation could worsen as Russian forces concentrate their efforts on the region, including with Mr Putin’s “private” Wagner army of more than 1,000 mercenaries.
Mr Raab said the use of these foreign fighters was “a worrying sign but it also probably shows you how dependent they [the Russians] have become on other fighters because of the weakness and fragility of the professional forces — and they are reliant on conscripts — which we are starting to see play out a bit in Ukraine. Certainly the Russian war machine, which had a pretty fearsome reputation, has been found to stutter and stumble, in at least the early stages of this campaign.”
Some reports suggest that more than 10,000 Russian soldiers have died, with some of them in their late teens.
Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the Commons foreign affairs committee, tweeted: “Putin is killing his own nation’s children.”
Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of civilians, have died since the invasion started on February 24, as well as many Ukrainian soldiers. Nearly four million people have fled abroad.
Cities including besieged Mariupol, which has been without electricity and running water for weeks, and with little food and medicine, have been bombarded to destruction.
In its latest intelligence update, the Ministry of Defence said some Russian units were heading back to Belarus or Russia to “reorganise and resupply”, which was a sign of “the difficulties Russia is having reorganising its units in forward areas within Ukraine”.
However, they warned that to “compensate” for the stalling of ground forces, Russian military chiefs were likely to carry on bombarding towns and cities with shelling and air strikes.
Britain is pushing for tighter sanctions on the Putin regime to force an end to the war. In Moscow, the foreign ministry said Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov had condemned the sanctions imposed on the Kremlin regime.
Poland said it will take steps to cut Russian oil imports by the end of 2022.
Peace talks took place in Istanbul on Tuesday.
