Kyiv is preparing for a major offensive

Berlin Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy sees his country confronted with massive challenges in towns and cities formerly occupied by Russian troops. The amount of work to restore normal life is “really enormous”.

The Ukrainian authorities are continuing to restore normal life in the areas that are again under Ukrainian control, Zelensky said in his evening video message on Saturday night. The scope of the work in the 918 towns and cities of different sizes is massive.

Mining work is being carried out and the supply of electricity, water and gas to the places is restored. The police, post office and local authorities are also resuming their work. Train connections have been set up again in the Sumy region in the north-east of the country or are about to be resumed with the city of Chernihiv in the north.

Humanitarian staffs have so far been established in 338 such locations. These provided, among other things, emergency medical care, said Selenski. Schools and other educational institutions should also be resumed where possible.

As of Friday, Russian troops had destroyed or damaged 1,018 educational institutions in the country, Zelenskiy said. The information could not be independently verified.

Destruction in the city of Sieverodonetsk

According to Ukrainian sources, the city of Sievjerodonetsk in the Luhansk region was also badly damaged by the Russian war of aggression. According to the head of the city’s military administration, Olexandr Strjuk, the city is about 70 percent destroyed.

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The most important roads were badly damaged and the water supply was also shut down pending repair work, Stryuk said on Ukraine’s national television. Of the around 130,000 residents before the war, only around 20,000 people are still on site, he said. The information could not initially be independently verified.

According to Ukrainian sources, at least ten people were killed when the industrial district of the eastern Ukrainian metropolis of Kharkiv was shelled. A seven-month-old baby was among the victims, the prosecutor’s office for the Kharkiv region announced on Facebook on Friday evening.

Ukraine also reported a Russian airstrike on an airfield in the city of Oleksandriya in the Kirovohrad region of central Ukraine. The rescue work was going on, Mayor Serhiy Kuzmenko wrote on Facebook. There was initially no information about damage or casualties.

Zelensky: 2,500 to 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed

According to information from Kyiv, 2,500 to 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since the beginning of the Russian invasion. According to the translation, Selenski said this to the US television station CNN in an interview, the first excerpts of which were distributed on Friday.

He also reported about 10,000 injured soldiers on the Ukrainian side. It is difficult to say how many of them would survive. According to Zelensky, 20,000 soldiers have already been killed on the Russian side. Moscow recently spoke of around 1,350 military personnel killed in its own ranks.

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Selensky has again called for tougher sanctions against Moscow. “The next package of sanctions against Russia must include a waiver of Russian oil,” he said in his video address that evening. Selensky called the current punitive measures against Russia “serious”, but not sufficient. “We demand stronger, more destructive ones.” The war could also be shortened if Kyiv received all the weapons it needed quickly.

Arms deliveries: Russia sends protest notes

Russia has sent protest notes to several Western countries over arms sales to Ukraine. The United States was among them, said Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, according to the Interfax agency. According to the US newspaper Washington Post, Moscow warns in the letter that such deliveries could have “unpredictable consequences”.

Since the Russian war of aggression began seven weeks ago, Ukraine has received arms from many countries. Germany wants to increase its arms aid to partner countries to two billion euros. Most of the money will go to Ukraine.

According to President Zelensky, Ukraine has almost completed the answers to a questionnaire for EU accession. “The work is almost complete and we will soon make the answers available to the representatives of the European Union,” he said in his video message. The questionnaire serves as the basis for accession talks.

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According to Federal Transport Minister Volker Wissing (FDP), the war in Ukraine is also having a major impact on the logistics sector in Germany. “The supply chains are severely affected,” Wissing told the editorial network Germany (RND/Saturday). The Silk Road, for example, is used less because freight forwarders take risks when they transport goods over it. In Poland alone, around 100,000 Ukrainian truck drivers were missing because they had been called up for military service. High energy prices also made things difficult for the industry.

This will be important today. Easter marches by the peace movement are planned for Saturday in several German cities. The rallies are primarily directed against the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine. In Berlin, the discussion about the delivery of heavy weapons from Germany to Ukraine continues.

No indication of the use of nuclear weapons

According to CIA director William Burns, he has no indication of an imminent Russian use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine. While one should not take lightly the danger that Russia could use tactical nuclear weapons, Burns said in a speech at the Georgia Institute of Technology and assured: “We do not.”

The Russian leadership may desperately want to present a success of their campaign. However, he does not know of any practical indications that the use of tactical nuclear weapons is imminent.

Tactical nuclear weapons have lower yield and range compared to strategic ones. They are to be used on the battlefield to clear the way for their own troops to bomb them.

According to a recent survey, people in East and West Germany react differently to the Ukraine war and its effects. In West Germany, almost two thirds of the people (64 percent) are willing to do without energy from Russia even in the event of an energy shortage, summarized the Eon Foundation the result of a representative survey by the opinion research institute Civey among 10,000 German citizens. In eastern Germany, less than half of those surveyed (42 percent) supported such a step.

According to the survey, the willingness to turn down the heating or drive less in the event of energy shortages is also much more pronounced in the West. While in the old federal states between 55 and 70 percent of those surveyed said they wanted to turn down the heating in the event of an energy shortage, less than half of those surveyed in eastern Germany (excluding Berlin) indicated that they intended to take such a step.

As an alternative to Russian gas, respondents in eastern Germany favored domestic coal, while respondents in the west favored solar and wind energy.

“The war in Ukraine has once again revealed the different attitudes of West and East Germans in relation to the energy transition and climate protection,” write the authors of the Eon Foundation in the evaluation of the survey. Overall, the skepticism about effective climate protection and the expansion of renewable energies among the citizens in the often rural regions of East Germany seems to be more pronounced in this tense situation than in West Germany.

Nationwide, rising energy prices employ people in rural regions (52 percent) significantly more than people in metropolitan areas (38 percent). On the other hand, people in very densely populated areas (61 percent) were more worried about an escalation of the war in Eastern Europe than in very sparsely populated, rural regions (49 percent).

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