KYIV, Ukraine
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa arrived in Ukraine on Friday as part of a delegation of African leaders and senior officials seeking ways to end Russia’s war, though an air raid in Kyiv during their visit was a grim reminder of the challenge they face.
Ramaphosa’s press service said
that he was met by a Ukrainian special envoy and South Africa’s ambassador at a
rail station near Bucha,
the Kyiv suburb where bodies of civilians lay scattered in the streets
following Russian forces’ withdrawal last spring.
The Bucha visit was
symbolically significant, as its name has come to stand for the barbarity of
Moscow’s military since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The brutal Russian occupation of Bucha left hundreds of civilians dead in the
streets and in mass graves.
The African delegation also
includes senior officials from Zambia, Senegal, Uganda, Egypt, the Republic of
the Congo and the Comoro Islands.
Shortly after they placed
commemorative candles at a small memorial outside St. Andrew’s Church in Bucha,
a town on the northwestern outskirts of Kyiv, air raid sirens began to wail in
the capital and Mayor Vitali Klitschko reported an explosion in the Podilskiy
district, one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods.
“Missiles still flying at
Kyiv,” Klitschko wrote on his Telegram channel.
Ramaphosa said
last month that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian
President Vladimir Putin had agreed to separate meetings with the delegation.
The delegation was set to
travel to St. Petersburg later Friday, where Russia’s top international
economic conference is taking place, and meet with Putin on Saturday.
Officials who helped prepare the talks said the African leaders not only aimed to initiate a peace process but also assess how Russia, which is under heavy international sanctions, can be paid for the fertilizer exports Africa desperately needs.
They are also set to discuss
the related issue of ensuring more grain shipments out of Ukraine amid the war
and the possibility of more prisoner swaps.
The African peace overture
comes as Ukraine launches a counteroffensive to dislodge the Kremlin’s forces
from occupied areas, using Western-supplied advanced weapons in attacks along
the 1,000-kilometer (600-mile) front line. Western analysts and military
officials have cautioned that the campaign could last a long time.
China has also been working
on a peace proposal, but it appears to have few chances of success as the
warring sides appear no closer to a cease-fire.
Ukrainian troops recorded successes
along three stretches of the front line in the country’s south and east, a
spokesman for Ukraine’s General Staff said in a statement Friday.
According to Andriy Kovalev,
Ukrainian forces have moved forward south of the town of Orikhiv in the Zaporizhzhia
region, in the direction of the village of Robotyne, as well as around Levadne
and Staromaiorske, on the boundary between Zaporizhzhia and the Donetsk
province further east.
Kovalev also said that
Ukrainian troops advanced in some areas around Vuhledar, a mining town in
Donetsk that was the site of one of the main tank battles in the war so far.
It wasn’t possible to
indepenently verify the claims.
Russian shelling on Thursday
and overnight killed two civilians and wounded two others in the southern Kherson
region, its Gov. Oleksandr Prokudin said.
Russian forces over the
previous day launched 54 strikes across the province, using mortars, artillery,
multiple rocket launchers, drones, missiles and aircraft, according to
Prokudin.
Ten people were wounded over
that same period in the eastern Donetsk region, local Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko
said.
No comments:
Post a Comment