The situation – Mariupol’s mayor demands evacuation of the city

Berlin The situation in the heavily contested Ukrainian city of Mariupol continues to deteriorate. The mayor calls for the complete evacuation of the Ukrainian port city. A humanitarian catastrophe is looming, says Wadym Boitschenko.

Among other things, 160,000 residents are without electricity. There are buses provided for an evacuation. However, Russia has not promised free passage. The positions of Russian forces in Ukraine have not changed significantly in the past 24 hours, according to British military intelligence.

However, they had gained more ground in the south-east near Mariupol, the Ministry of Defense said in London. There, the Russian troops would primarily try to take the port.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky describes the situation in Mariupol as a clear humanitarian catastrophe. “All entrances and exits of the city are blocked,” Zelensky said in a video address. “The port is mined.” It is impossible to bring food, medicine and water there. The information cannot be independently verified.

According to information from Kyiv, no escape corridors for the evacuation of civilians can be set up this Monday due to the threat from Russian troops. There is intelligence information about possible “provocations” on the routes, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said on Monday. For weeks, Ukraine and Russia have accused each other of sabotaging the evacuation of civilians from particularly hard-fought areas.

Fighting in many parts of the country apparently continues

The Ukrainian newspaper “Pravda” meanwhile reported, citing various regional administrations, that Russian shelling was continuing in different parts of the country.

There have been rocket attacks in the region around Kyiv and fighting along a highway. In Chernihiv in the north, Ukrainian soldiers fended off Russian attacks last night. The Zhytomyr and Kharkiv areas were also fired at with rockets and bombs. The information cannot be independently verified.

According to Ukrainian sources, Russian troops want to break through the defenses around Kyiv and push further towards the capital. In the northwest and east, the Ukrainian army is fending off attempts by Russian soldiers to take control of important roads and settlements, the Ukrainian general staff said on Monday morning.

Meanwhile, the Russian Ministry of Defense has published footage of armored vehicles leaving the town of Zalissia about 40 kilometers from Kyiv and said to be traveling on the E95 highway.

The information provided by both sides cannot be independently verified. In the morning, the Ukrainian General Staff also reported ongoing fighting in other parts of the country, including in the Mykolaiv and Zaporizhia regions in the south.

According to the Ukrainian Ministry of Economic Affairs, the war has caused damage worth $564.9 billion so far. According to Economics Minister Julia Svyrydenko, this would include damage to infrastructure, losses in economic output and other factors. 8,000 kilometers of roads and ten million square meters of living space have been damaged or destroyed. The information cannot be independently verified.

Negotiations in Istanbul probably on Tuesday

According to the Kremlin, new personal peace talks between two delegations from Ukraine and Russia could begin on Tuesday in Istanbul. “Today they will probably not continue there,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday, according to the Interfax agency. “We expect that could theoretically happen tomorrow.”

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The head of the Russian delegation, Vladimir Medinski, had previously announced that after around two weeks of online negotiations, a personal meeting was planned from Tuesday.

A Turkish government official said earlier that the new round of talks between Ukraine and Russia’s negotiators in Istanbul is expected to start later in the day. He did not give details.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed in a telephone call on Sunday that the new round of negotiations, which were last conducted via video conference, should take place in Istanbul. The government in Ankara had already hosted a meeting of the foreign ministers of Russia and Ukraine in Antalya and had repeatedly offered to broker a ceasefire.

In the run-up to the new round of negotiations, the Ukrainian government dampened expectations. “I don’t think there will be a breakthrough on the most important issues,” said Interior Ministry adviser Vadym Denysenko.

According to Ukraine President Zelenskiy, the negotiations with Russia in Turkey will primarily be about “sovereignty and territorial integrity”. Ukraine is striving for an immediate peace, Zelenskiy said. “There is an opportunity and a need for a face-to-face meeting in Turkey. That’s not bad. Let’s wait for the result,” Zelenski said.

Economists outraged by Chancellor’s statements

In Germany, meanwhile, statements by Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) on the TV talk show Anne Will have fueled the debate about stopping energy imports from Russia.

Scholz said on the show that economists would be “wrong” if they assumed that an energy embargo on Russia could be managed by the German economy. It was “irresponsible to add up any mathematical models that then don’t work,” said Scholz harshly.

The statements sparked outrage among economists. “No problem with well-founded criticism of the model. But please not like that,” tweeted Ifo economist Andreas Peichl, one of the authors of the study who came to the conclusion that an embargo was manageable.

Janis Kluge from the Politics and Science Foundation described Scholz’s statements as hard stuff. Internationally successful German scientists wanted to advise German politicians pro bono and delivered urgently needed, differentiated analyzes in a rush. “And then they have to listen to something like that from Berlin because their results don’t match,” says Kluge.

The trade union IG Bergbau, Chemie, Energie, on the other hand, warned of massive job losses if energy imports from Russia were stopped immediately. “If we don’t have compensation, it will cost hundreds of thousands of jobs over a relatively short period of time, but above all it will also have an impact on supply,” says IG-BCE boss Michael Vassiliadis on Deutschlandfunk.

With a 50 percent reduction, for example, the world’s largest chemical site in Ludwigshafen would have to be shut down to zero because it would then no longer be possible to operate it stably overall. The employees would then go on short-time work or lose their jobs.

In addition, the entire production would no longer be available and would be missing in many economic sectors such as the pharmaceutical and construction industries. This could even be felt worldwide.

Kremlin: Russia replaces oil exports to Europe with Asia

In response to Scholz’s statements on the talk show, Russia wants to replace falling oil supplies to European countries with exports to Asia. There is also a market “in Southeast Asia, in the east,” said Kremlin spokesman Peskov on Monday in Moscow, according to the Interfax agency. The world market is more diverse than just the European market. “Although, of course, the European market is premium,” admitted the spokesman for the Russian President.

At the same time, Peskov made it clear that Russia insisted that future natural gas deliveries to European countries would have to be paid for in rubles. It is clear that if Russia refuses, it will not supply gas to Europe “for free”. In the current situation in Russia, this is “hardly possible and makes sense”.

While Germany is primarily dependent on Russian gas, the United Arab Emirates believe that Russian oil is indispensable for the energy market. No oil-producing country can replace it, it is needed, says Energy Minister Suhail al-Masruei.

His country will work with the other oil states in the OPEC plus network to keep the market stable. Russia is an important member of the group. Political questions must be left out. You have to be honest and tell consumers that if nothing is done, bills will double or even triple in the future.

With agency material.

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