Chris Lange, FISM News
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Ukrainian authorities said Moscow continued to target infrastructure and residential areas throughout Ukraine Monday, including in Kyiv, causing widespread electricity and water outages, The Associated Press reported.
“Another batch of Russian missiles hits Ukraine’s critical infrastructure. Instead of fighting on the battlefield, Russia fights civilians,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said in a tweet.
“Don’t justify these attacks by calling them a ‘response’. Russia does this because it still has the missiles and the will to kill Ukrainians,” Kuleba continued.
Vessels carrying Ukrainian grain depart, despite Russia’s pullout from agreement
“Russia is not interested in peace talks, nor in global food security. Putin’s only goal is death and destruction,” said foreign ministry spokesman Oleg Nikolenko, referring to Russia’s decision to stop cooperating with a grain export deal. Kremlin authorities announced that they would no longer cooperate in facilitating Ukrainian grain shipments after claiming that Kyiv forces attacked its Black Sea fleet in a Crimean port on Saturday.
Ukraine has neither confirmed nor denied it was behind the attack on the Russian fleet, in keeping with its usual tight-lipped policy concerning incidents in Crimea, which Moscow annexed in 2014.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of “blackmailing the world with hunger” by pulling out of the food export deal negotiated by the United Nations and Turkey.
A total of 218 vessels laden with grain were blocked, Ukraine’s infrastructure ministry said on Monday, including a U.N.-chartered vessel carrying tens of thousands of tons of wheat to the Horn of Africa as part of an emergency response to hunger. Later in the morning, however, 12 ships carrying grain left Ukrainian ports, Reuters reported. The U.N. said on Sunday that it had made arrangements with Ukraine and Turkey for 14 ships in Turkish waters to move Black Sea grain on Monday.
President Biden on Saturday decried Russia’s pull-out of the export deal as “purely outrageous” and said the move will result in starvation. The following day, Russia’s ambassador to Washington fired back, saying the U.S. was making false accusations about Russia that were themselves “outrageous.”
Russia’s Lavrov said Biden must ‘understand who gives orders and how’
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Sunday compared the 1962 Cuban missile crisis to current tensions over Ukraine, saying “I hope that in today’s situation, President Joe Biden will have more opportunities to understand who gives orders and how.”
Earlier this month, Biden compared Russian threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine to the Cuban crisis, during which the U.S. and the Soviet Union hovered on the brink of nuclear war.
In an interview for a Russian state television documentary on the missile crisis, Lavrov said that there are similarities between the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the 1962 crisis, saying that Russia is being threatened by Western weapons in Ukraine.
“This situation is very disturbing,” Lavrov said. In an apparent dig at President Biden, he added that “the difference is that in the distant 1962, Khrushchev and Kennedy found the strength to show responsibility and wisdom, and now we do not see such readiness on the part of Washington and its satellites.”
Asked what Russia should do now in the current crisis, Lavrov said: “The readiness of Russia, including President Vladimir Putin, for negotiations remains unchanged.”
The remarks came just a day after the U.S. and Russian defense ministers spoke for a second time in three days since talks abruptly ended in May.
Still, it remains unlikely that a peace deal is on the horizon: No doubt emboldened by recent military gains and Western-supplied weapons, Ukraine has moved away from its early eagerness to negotiate an end to the conflict, with President Zelenskyy vowing to continue to fight until every last Russian is ejected from Ukrainian territory.