The European Union is expected to outline oil sanctions against Moscow as Russia continued its attacks on eastern Ukraine and unleashed rockets on a steel plant that is the last redoubt for resistance in the port city of Mariupol.
The attacks came as the head of the UK armed forces criticised the Kremlin’s military campaign, characterised by “shocking intelligence failures”.
Pummelled by western sanctions, Russia now faces new measures from the EU that would target its banks and oil industry - a major step for European countries that rely heavily on Russian energy.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen is expected to spell out the proposed new sanctions on Wednesday, including a ban on imports of Russian oil by the end of this year.
Russia’s own $1.8tn economy is heading for its biggest contraction since the years after the 1991 break-up of the Soviet Union. Russian president Vladimir Putin raised the economic stakes for Kyiv’s western backers by announcing plans to block exports of vital raw materials.
The impending sanctions came as scores of evacuees who managed to leave the city under United Nations and Red Cross auspices reached the relative safety of Ukraine-controlled Zaporizhzhia on Tuesday.
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said 156 people arrived in Zaporizhzhia, after sheltering beneath the sprawling Azovstal steel complex for more than two months.
“Finally, these people are completely safe. They will get help,” Zelenskiy said.
Exhausted-looking people, including young children and pensioners laden with bags, clambered off buses in the car park of a shopping centre. “I can’t believe I made it, we just want rest,” said Alina Kozitskaya.
One middle-aged woman walked away from the evacuation bus sobbing and comforted by an aid worker. A few women greeting the convoy held up handmade signs, calling on Ukrainian authorities to evacuate the soldiers – their relatives and loved ones – who are trapped in Azovstal and encircled by Russian forces.
“Under permanent fire, sleeping on improvised mats, being pounded by the blast waves, running with your son and being knocked to the ground by an explosion – everything was horrible,” said evacuee Anna Zaitseva.
She carried her six-month-old baby in her arms and cried when expressing her gratitude to everyone from the troops who found formula for her child to the urgent international rescue effort that got them to safety.
Four humanitarian corridors from Mariupol to Zaporizhzhia are due to open from 8am local time on Wednesday “if the safety situation allows”, Iryna Vereshchuk, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, said.
Late Tuesday Russian forces shelled and had attempted to storm the Azovstal steelworks. Elsewhere, attacks in the Donetsk region killed 21 civilians and injured 27, the regional governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said on Tuesday. He said the figure was the highest daily death toll in the region since an attack on a railway station in Kramatorsk in April that killed more than 50 people.
Having failed to capture the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, Putin switched the invasion’s focus to the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, collectively known as Donbas, parts of which have been held by Russian-backed separatists since 2014.
Amid that shift in strategy, Admiral Sir Antony Radakin, chief of the British defence staff, criticised the Kremlin’s military campaign and characterised by “shocking intelligence failures” and “arrogance.”
Adm. Radakin told a Wall Street Journal summit in London Russia’s failure to take control of the country was the consequence of a “shocking intelligence failure and it’s also an incredible arrogance.”
“Their decision making rarely improves, and their decision making gets worse. We have been surprised at the way Russia has gone about this,” Adm. Radakin said on Tuesday.
“Whatever their endgame is, it is drastically different from their start game,” he said.
In other developments:
The mayor of Lviv said Russian missile strikes had damaged electricity and water networks in the western city near the Polish border, across which flows western arms supplies for Ukraine’s military.
Russian forces also struck six railway stations in the centre and west of the country, the head of Ukraine’s railways, Olesksandr Kamyshin, said. There were no injuries to civilians, he added on Twitter.
A Russian tycoon, who previously condemned Moscow’s “insane war” in Ukraine, says he has been punished by the Kremlin for his stance and accused Russia of slipping into archaism. In an emotional post on Instagram in April, Oleg Tinkov, 54, said that “90% of Russians” were against the Kremlin’s “massacre” in Ukraine.
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Russia has said it will boycott a UN security council meeting set for Wednesday with the EU’s Political and Security Committee (PSC). According to a Russian diplomatic source speaking anonymously to AFP on Tuesday, Moscow’s decision is linked to the situation in Ukraine.
