WAR IN UKRAINE: April 22, 2022
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS: Day 57
Ukrainians continue to resist in the besieged city of Mariupol, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said, contradicting Russia's claim that it had "liberated" the strategic Sea of Azov port after almost two months of intense shelling that has caused thousands of deaths and widespread destruction. The British military has said that heavy shelling continued in Donbas as Russia seeks to advance further in eastern Ukraine - RFE/RL
Almost three quarters of the population left the government-controlled area of Donetsk region - currently there are only about 430,000 people left - the head of the Donetsk Regional State Administration Pavlo Kyrylenko. Pre-war about 1.67 million people lived permanently in Donetsk region. In Kramatorsk, the largest city in the region after Mariupol, only 40,000 remain of a population that typically numbers 200,000, Kyrylenko said.
Pentagon says Ukraine has more tanks on the ground than Russia. Ukrainian forces have more tanks in Ukraine than the Russians do, “and they certainly have the purview to use them,” said an undisclosed senior U.S. defense official quoted by the Washington Post.
The Swiss Government has announced plans to apportion displaced Ukrainians in the country’s 26 cantons in order to avoid congestion. Around 37,000 refugees from Ukraine have been registered in Switzerland over the past seven weeks. Cities including Zurich, Basel and Bern as well as the Ticino region have increasingly been struggling with a high number of refugees. “We want to create more stability both for the refugees and the cantonal offices in charge of welfare or education to avoid a disproportional distribution of people in need,” Swiss migration official David Keller told a news conference on Thursday - SwissInfo
Back in Ukraine, officials in Lviv say they’ve only 18,000 spaces left for IDPs, most of which are simply beds in a protective space.
As the Russian military begins a new offensive in eastern Ukraine, the Kremlin is accelerating efforts to indoctrinate young Russians and consolidate the pro-war consensus on the domestic front for a further generation. Read the full Atlantic Council Ukraine Alert commentary here
As Russian President Putin order his troops to block the exit of civilians and Ukrainian soldiers in the besieged city of Mariupol, we are seeing the Russian side exceed the lowest levels of humanity. At least in other conflicts or theatres of war, combatants had agreed to lay down their arms at least for a few hours for things like vaccination campaigns or evacuation of the most vulnerable. The Russian Armed Forces don’t seem to have that capability and that “leaves us in a bad place as a world community,” says Michael Bociurkiw, Global Affairs Analyst and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center. He provided his analysis to ABC Radio Australia RN Breakfast. Listen here
“As soon as we see the Russian side fall to a new level of inhumanity, they manage to go ever further”