An order by President Vladimir Putin to cut off gas buyers unless they pay in rubles on Friday has raised alarm in Europe, which has been seen as Moscow’s most powerful retaliatory measure against Western economic sanctions. Germany, the largest buyer, rejected the demand as “blackmail”. But the pipelines were pumping normally on Friday. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peshkov said the decree would not affect shipments already paid for, but would only be considered when new payments were due in the second half of the month. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register “Does this mean that if there is no confirmation in rubles, then the gas supply will be cut off from April 1? No, it does not happen, and it does not follow from the decree,” Peshkov told reporters. Negotiations to end the war resumed via video link, although Ukrainian forces launched a counterattack that pushed the Russians out of Kyiv and broke the siege of some cities in the north and east. Russia has said it has made progress in the talks and will respond to a Ukrainian peace proposal delivered earlier this week. The Red Cross said it had been banned from bringing aid to what would be the first humanitarian convoy to reach the besieged port of Mariupol, but still hoped to be able to organize the evacuation of residents by bus. After failing to capture a single major Ukrainian city in five weeks of war, Russia says it is withdrawing from northern Ukraine and turning its focus to the southeast, including Mariupol. “Eternal FEAR” Russia has described its withdrawal from northern Ukraine as a gesture of goodwill for peace talks. Ukraine and its allies say Russian forces have been forced to reorganize after suffering heavy casualties due to poor logistics and fierce Ukrainian resistance. Irpin, a passenger suburb northwest of Kiev that has been one of the main battlefields for weeks, is now firmly in the hands of Ukraine, a wilderness full of burned tanks. Volunteers and emergency workers transported the dead on stretchers out of the rubble. About a dozen corpses were zippered in black plastic bags, lined up on a street and loaded onto trucks. Lilia Ristich was sitting on a metal playground swing with her little son Artur. Most people had fled. they had stayed. “We were afraid to leave because they were shooting all the time, from day one. It was horrible when our house was hit. It was horrible,” he said. He recorded the neighbors who had been killed – the man “buried there, in the grass”. the couple with their 12-year-old child, all burned alive. A view shows gas wells in the Bovanenkovo gas field owned by Gazprom in the Arctic Peninsula Yamal, Russia, May 21, 2019. REUTERS / Maxim Shemetov / File Photo read more “When our army came, then I fully understood that we had been liberated. It was happiness beyond imagination. I pray that it all ends and that they never return,” he said. “When you hold a child in your arms it is an eternal fear.” The governor of the Kiev region, Oleksandr Pavlyuk, said on Friday that Russian forces had also withdrawn from Hostomel, another northwestern suburb where heavy fighting was taking place but was still in Bucha, between Hostomel and Irpin. Further north, Russian forces have withdrawn from the site of the former Chernobyl nuclear power plant, although Ukrainian officials say some Russians are still in the “exclusion zone” of radioactive substances around it. In the last 10 days, Ukrainian forces have recaptured suburbs near Kyiv, broken the siege of Sumy in the east and repulsed Russian forces advancing on Mykolaiv in the south. In the latest Ukrainian offensive, the British Ministry of Defense said on Friday that Ukrainian forces had recaptured villages linking Kyiv with the besieged northern city of Chernihiv. BLOCKED RED CROSS AID Friday’s peace video talks stemmed from a meeting in Turkey on Monday, in which Ukraine offered to accept a neutral regime, with international guarantees for its security. The Ukrainian proposal will postpone the debate on Russia’s territorial claims, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, and Donbass, which Ukraine demands to cede to the separatists. “We are preparing an answer. There is some movement forward, especially in terms of recognizing Ukraine’s inability to join NATO,” Lavrov said on Friday. He said there was “much more understanding of another reality. I mean the situation in Crimea and Donbass.” Putin sent troops on February 24 for what he called a “special military operation” to demilitarize Ukraine. Western countries call it an unprovoked offensive war and say Putin’s real goal was to overthrow the Ukrainian government. Russia now says it has turned its attention to Donbass, a southeastern region where it has supported separatists since 2014. Russia’s biggest target in the region is Mariupol, where the United Nations believes thousands of civilians have been killed under one month of siege, suffering relentless bombing without access to food and water, medicine or heat. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said it had not been allowed to bring aid to Mariupol on a motorcade. He did not say who had refused the permit. Spokesman Ewan Watson said the bus escort had left for Mariupol on Friday without supplies, hoping to reach the city to evacuate trapped civilians. Ukraine has accused Russia of refusing to allow any aid to reach the city. A fuel depot in the Russian city of Belgorod near the border with Ukraine caught fire and the regional governor said he had been hit by two Ukrainian helicopters in what would, if confirmed, be Ukraine’s first known air raid on Russian soil. The Ministry of Defense of Ukraine did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Russian oil company Rosneft, which owns the warehouse, reported the fire without specifying the cause. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Additional reports by Pavel Polityuk in Lviv, Olzhas Auyezov in Almaty and other Reuters offices. written by Peter Graff. curated by Philippa Fletcher Our role models: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
