Ukraine’s defense and foreign ministers have stressed the need for NATO engagement -- including membership for Kyiv -- to safeguard security in their country and the entire Black Sea region, as Russian forces continued their assault on the city of Bakhmut and elsewhere in eastern Ukraine.
"We need a system of guarantees that would make aggression from Russia impossible," defense chief Oleksiy Reznikov told a security conference in the Romanian capital, Bucharest, on April 13.
"There is no alternative to Ukraine's accession to NATO," he said.
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Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, speaking to the conference by video link, urged the Western alliance to become more active in the region and said it was time to turn the Black Sea into “a sea of NATO.”
Kuleba also urged NATO to accept his country and Georgia, also a Black Sea littoral state, as members.
He said the upcoming NATO summit in Vilnius should present “a clear plan on when and how Ukraine will enter.”
Kuleba also restated Kyiv’s position that peace is only possible in Ukraine if Russia withdraws from all Ukrainian territory, including the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which Moscow has occupied since 2014.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov at a Moscow briefing rejected Kuleba’s comments about the Black Sea.
“This is a shared sea,” Peskov said. “It must be a sea of cooperation, interaction, and security for all its littoral states.”
Meanwhile, Moscow and Kyiv exchanged conflicting comments on the situation in Bakhmut, the mostly destroyed eastern Ukrainian city, which has been the focal point of a monthslong Russian attempt to capture a built-up area and hail some kind of battlefield victory.
Moscow claimed to have cut off Ukrainian troops in Bakhmut, but the head of the Kremlin-linked Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said it remains "too early" to say the city has been surrounded.
Serhiy Cherevaty, a spokesman for Ukraine's Eastern Group of Forces, rejected claims that Ukrainian forces had been cut off in Bakhmut, telling the AFP news agency that army chiefs still had communication with troops there and were able to resupply them with ammunition.
"This does not correspond to reality," Cherevaty said in response to Russian claims.
"We are able to... deliver food products, ammunition, medicines, all that is necessary, and also to recover our wounded," he said.
Bakhmut As Seen From Both The Russian And Ukrainian Battle Lines
Off the battlefield, Germany approved Poland's request to export five old MiG-29 fighter jets to bolster Ukraine's air power, the German Defense Ministry said on April 13.
Germany inherited 24 MiG-29 jets from East Germany during reunification in 1990, then in 2004 supplied most of them to Poland, which requires Berlin’s approval before shipping them to a third country.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, who is currently in Washington, posted on Twitter that he had signed an agreement under which the World Bank would provide $200 million to repair Ukraine’s electrical grid, which has been badly damaged in recent months by Russian air strikes targeting its civilian infrastructure.
In Moscow, Russia’s Prosecutor-General’s Office opened an investigation into videos that appeared online purporting to show the beheading of a Ukrainian prisoner of war by Russian troops. Prigozhin dismissed allegations that the executioners were Wagner fighters.
On April 12, Ukraine launched a probe of the video, while President Volodymyr Zelenskiy condemned the purported execution.
“We are not going to forget anything,” he said in a video posted on Twitter.