KYIV,May03,2022: Efforts to evacuate more civilians from the devastated Ukrainian port city of Mariupol ran into delays on Monday (Apr 2) and hundreds of people remained trapped in the Azovstal steel works, the last stronghold of resistance to the Russian siege.
It was not clear what was causing the hold-up made up of civilians from the city itself.
Russian forces had on Sunday resumed shelling the steel works after an earlier convoy of buses had successfully left from that location, an aide to the mayor said.
The plight of civilians trapped in Mariupol, which endured weeks of bombardment before Russian forces captured most of it, has been a focus of humanitarian concern as the war has ground on into a third month.
Thousands are believed to have been killed and those still stuck in the besieged Azovstal complex, whose network of bunkers and tunnels has provided shelter, were running out of water, food and medicine.
“The situation has become a sign of a real humanitarian catastrophe,” Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said.
On other fronts, towns in eastern Ukraine were coming under intense Russian bombardment, a regional governor said. A Russian rocket strike hit a main bridge across the Dniester estuary just west of the port city of Odesa in southwest Ukraine, authorities said.
April 27,2022: Russia halted gas supplies to Poland under the Yamal contract on Wednesday, data from the European Union network of gas transmission operators showed, in a deepening of the rift between the West and Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom informed the two EU and NATO member nations that gas supplies will be suspended starting Wednesday, their governments said.
The suspensions would be the first since Putin’s announcement last month that “unfriendly foreign buyers” would have to transact with Gazprom in rubles instead of dollars and euros. Only Hungary has agreed to do so, with other countries rejecting the demand as an unacceptable, one-sided breach of contracts and a violation of sanctions.
The move will be a grave concern to those countries who are the most heavily dependent on Russian gas, such as Germany, but at a hastily arranged press conference, Polish ministers said they had sufficient supplies to weather an interruption while accusing Gazprom of a breach of contract.
BERLIN, April 25,2022: There is insufficient support from European Union member states for a complete embargo or punitive tariff on Russian oil and gas imports, the EU’s top diplomat Josep Borrell was quoted as saying by German newspaper Die Welt on Monday.
“At the moment, we in the EU do not have a unified position on this question,” Borrell told the newspaper.
Oil exports are the Kremlin’s main source of foreign currency and many within the EU have called for an end to oil payments because they effectively finance the war in Ukraine, which Russia calls a “special military operation”.
Some EU countries are pushing for a sixth sanctions package on Russia and Brussels is preparing a full impact assessment of an oil ban as part of possible further measures.
Russia is Europe’s biggest oil supplier, providing just over a quarter of EU oil imports in 2020, according to data from the bloc’s statistics office Eurostat.
Borrell said the topic will be discussed at the next EU summit due at the end of next month and that he did not expect any decision on the matter before then.