Russia is trying to sever Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said yesterday, following days of ramped-up air strikes on ports and energy facilities in the Odesa region and a critical route to the Moldova border.
Russia has unleashed an almost continuous drone and missile campaign against a region where ports key to Ukraine’s foreign trade and fuel supplies operate, after Moscow threatened to cut “Ukraine off from the sea”.
Strikes have escalated even as the US pursues an uphill diplomatic drive to coax a deal to end the war.
“The situation in the Odesa region is harsh due to Russian strikes on port infrastructure and logistics. Russia is once again trying to restrict Ukraine’s access to the sea and block our coastal regions,” Zelenskiy told reporters in Kyiv.
Russia’s aim is “to sow chaos, to exert moral pressure during winter... so that there is no fuel, no food supplies, so that there are problems with medical supplies,” he said.
Russia’s attack on Pivdennyi port yesterday hit reservoirs, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Kuleba said on the Telegram messaging app, a day after a missile strike on the port killed eight people and injured at least 30.
Geneva-based vegetable oil producer Allseeds said three tanks storing sunflower oil at the site were set ablaze in Pivdennyi, and one of its workers was killed and two injured.
The Kremlin has said Ukraine’s economic infrastructure is a legitimate military target in the almost four-year-old full-out war.
Zelenskiy said yesterday that Ukraine would back a US proposal for three-sided talks with the US and Russia if it facilitated more exchanges of prisoners and paved the way for meetings of national leaders.
Zelenskiy also said top Ukrainian negotiator Rustem Umerov had told him of the latest discussions that took place on Friday with US negotiators in the US.
A new round was scheduled today, he said, focusing on Ukraine’s post-war recovery.
Russian special envoy Kirill Dmitriev was also in Miami for talks with US officials.
Zelenskiy said the US was now proposing three-sided talks – the US, Ukraine and Russia – at the level of national security advisers.
“If such a meeting could be held now to allow for swaps of prisoners of war or if a meeting of national security advisers achieves agreement on a leaders’ meeting...I cannot be opposed. We would support such a US proposal. Let’s see how things go.”
Zelenskiy said Ukraine stood for proposals that would leave the “contact line” where it was without Ukraine having to give up territory it still controlled in the industrial region of Donbas in eastern Ukraine.
“For me, the fair version is we stand where we are now standing,” he said.
“This is a matter of principle. Whatever the format and however we approach the issue, it is important for us that Ukrainian authorities retain control over that part of Donbas that we control now.”
He said a US proposal to create a “free economic zone” in eastern Ukraine was a matter “to be decided by the people of Ukraine”.
Since Thursday, Russian forces have hit a bridge on the Dniester River near the village of Mayaky, southwest of Pivdennyi, at least five times, Kuleba told reporters.
The bridge, which connects parts of the region divided by the river and sea inlets, is the main transport route westward to border crossings with Moldova, and is not operational now.
The route accounts for around 40 per cent of fuel supplies to Ukraine, Kuleba said.
Ukrainian authorities have set up a pontoon bridge and re-routed logistics through other regions, securing civilian and freight logistics.
“The focus of the war may have shifted towards Odessa,” Kuleba said, adding that the “crazy” attacks could escalate even further as Russia tries to undermine Ukraine’s economy.
Last week, one of the war’s biggest Russian air attacks on the Black Sea region damaged energy facilities and prompted a blackout in the biggest seaport Odesa, plunging hundreds of thousands of civilians into darkness for days.
Air strikes on ports also damaged three Turkish-flagged vessels in December.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has vowed to cut Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea in retaliation for Kyiv’s recent drone strikes on Moscow’s sanctions-busting “shadow-fleet” tankers.
Ukraine says those vessels are used to transport oil, Russia’s main revenue source for funding its almost four-year-old full-scale invasion of its neighbour.
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