WAR IN UKRAINE: April 21, 2022
Smoke rises above the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works company in the southern port city of Mariupol, Ukraine, on April 20. (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS: Day 56
Today is Holy Thursday on the Julian calendar. Church leaders are taking the painful decision to either curtail Easter celebrations or cancel them all together in areas of conflict. Due to the risk of places of worship being targeted, the faithful are being encouraged to attend church services online and even partake in the traditional blessing of Easter baskets online. The city of Lviv has shortened curfew hours in time for the Easter holiday however all night church services will not be held this year. The decision was made with all church leaders. “Vigilance is key right now as there’s nothing sacred to the enemy,” said Yehen Boiko, chief of the Mayor’s Administration.
Russia has rejected the proposal of the Secretary General of the United Nations, to introduce a 4-day "Easter humanitarian pause" in Ukraine. The Russian spokesman said the truce is "a desire to give the Kyiv nationalists and radicals a respite so that they can regroup."
Four evacuation buses managed to leave the besieged city of Mariupol on Wednesday through an evacuation corridor, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said Thursday. "They spent the night in Berdiansk and are now heading to Vasylivka," Vereshchuk said in a statement on Telegram. "We are waiting for them in Zaporizhzhia soon." - CNN
Putin calls storming of Azovstal steel mill in Mariupol impractical. After a 50-day assault on Mariupol, Vladimir Putin told Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu that a full block of the mill is more rational. Shoigu said that except for the heavily fortified Azovstal, Mariupol had been occupied by Russian troops, the Kyiv Independent reported. A senior Ukrainian official said it is immediately to evacuate 1000 civilians and 500 wounded soldiers from the plant. Mariupol would be the biggest Ukrainian city taken by the Russian side; an estimated 21,000 people have died in the port city.
Ukrainians, including many church leaders and clergy, are livid at what they regard as an ill-timed and tone deaf attempt by the Vatican to push reconciliation between Ukrainians and Russians. As recounted by Mychailo Wynnyckyj of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy: “On the Roman Catholics’ Good Friday, at the insistence of Pope Francis, during the annual Way of the Cross procession held in the Roman Colosseum, at station 13, the cross was held jointly by two women: one Russian and one Ukrainian. The liturgic gesture was meant to symbolize reconciliation and hope for peace….Pope Francis was wrong to insist on a public display of reconciliation between Ukraine and Russia without a prior display of penance by the latter. The Ukrainian Catholic Patriarch Sviatoslav told him as much, stating publicly that the joint liturgic gesture was ‘inappropriate and ambiguous, and does not take into account the context of Russian military aggression against Ukraine.’
On Wednesday I put the question to Pavlo Drozdiak, of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. His reply: “I can’t but agree with Patriarch Sviatoslav, the leader of our church. We’re experiencing enormous anguish and it’s not the right time to be discussing this format of reconciliation. This format of communication is not timely. Because we are experiencing some horrendous events. And we cannot be talking about achieving peace at any price. This price is very high and we are already paying a very high price. The church is with the people, and the people are with the church. We can’t have a compromise with our conscience, we cannot reach a compromise with some diplomatic levers because this is their way of presenting a model of forgiveness and a model of reconciliation. We are on the pathway and this pathway will be thorny but we will definitely finish the journey.”Wimbledon officials confirm they will bar Russian and Belarusian players from playing in this year’s tournament because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Belarus’s support of the war. It includes world number two Daniil Medvedev
Judging by overhead conversations in Lviv restaurants and coffee shops, huge numbers of aid workers - many of them American - have flooded into the western Ukrainian city. It has long-since served as a humanitarian hub and the UN has based many of its teams here. As estimated 200,000 internally displaced people have temporarily settled in Lviv placing pressure on accommodation and other infrastructure.
The debris of a Sukhoi SU-34 Russian fighter jet downed near Chernihiv was the centerpiece of a press conference yesterday at Ukraine Media Center in Lviv. It was part of a new campaign to raise funds for Ukraine’s Air Force called #BUYMEAFIGHTERJET. Officials said the ratio of downing of fighter jets in this war is 1-5 in Ukraine’s favour. But Ukraine has only 50 combat ready aircraft while the Russian side has 400, said Serhii Drozdov, former commander of Ukraine Armed Forces. The jets don’t come cheap: $50-60 million is the cost of each of the Russian fighter jets. Officials were unclear on how much they intend to collect and from where the jets will be sourced.
“We’re experiencing enormous anguish and it’s not the right time to be discussing this format of reconciliation. This format of communication is not timely. Because we are experiencing some horrendous events. And we cannot be talking about achieving peace at any price. This price is very high and we are already paying a very high price. The church is with the people, and the people are with the church. We can’t have a compromise with our conscience,”
Ukrainian officials display the remains of a downed Russian Sukhoi Su-34 fighter jet Wednesday at the Ukrainian Media Centre in Lviv.