Biden to visit Poland to discuss Ukraine crisis

US President Joe Biden will travel to Poland during his Europe trip to discuss international efforts to support Ukraine and impose “severe and unprecedented costs” on Russia for its invasion, the White House said in a statement. “This week, President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. will travel to Poland following his meetings in Brussels, Belgium with our NATO Allies, G7 Leaders, and European Union leaders to discuss international efforts to support Ukraine and impose severe and unprecedented costs on Russia for its invasion,” White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said in a statement. The statement said, on Friday, March 25, President Biden will travel to Warsaw, Poland, where he will hold a bilateral meeting with President Andrzej Duda. “The President will discuss how the United States, alongside our Allies and partners, is responding to the humanitarian and human rights crisis that Russia’s unjustified and unprovoked war on Ukraine has created,” read the statement. Meanwhile, on 23 March, Biden will travel to Brussels, Belgium.

On 24 March, Biden will attend an extraordinary NATO Summit to discuss ongoing deterrence and defence efforts in response to Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified attack on Ukraine.

Meanwhile, shelling hit a Kyiv shopping centre late on Sunday, killing at least eight people, wrecking nearby buildings and leaving smoking piles of rubble and the twisted wreckage of burned-out cars spread over several hundred metres. Firefighters were putting out small blazes around the smouldering carcass of a building in the shopping centre car park and looking for possible survivors on Monday. Ukraine’s nuclear regulatory agency said the radiation monitors around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, site of the world’s worst meltdown in 1986, have stopped working. In a statement on Monday, the agency also said firefighters are no longer available in the region to protect forests tainted by decades of radioactivity as the weather warms. The plant was seized by Russian forces on 24 February. According to statement, the combination of risks could mean a “significant deterioration” of the ability to control the spread of radiation not just in Ukraine, but beyond the country’s borders in weeks and months to come.

The Russian military has asked the Ukrainian troops defending the strategic port of Mariupol to lay down arms and exit the city via humanitarian corridors, but that proposal was quickly rejected by the Ukrainian authorities. Russian forces have pounded some suburbs of the Ukrainian capital, but defenders have so far managed to prevent Kyiv from coming under the kind of full-scale assault that has devastated eastern cities such as Mariupol and Kharkiv. Six bodies were lain out on the pavement as emergency services combed through the wreckage to the sound of distant artillery fire. Ukraine’s Prosecutor General said at least eight people had been killed in the blast.

Meanwhile, Russian and Ukrainian peace negotiators held a 90-minute video call on Monday and working groups will continue to meet throughout the day, a member of the Ukrainian delegation said. “Today we are working the whole day,” Ukrainian delegate and lawmaker David Arakhamia was quoted as saying by Ukrainian media.

A report from Moscow said a senior naval commander from Russia’s Black Sea Fleet had been killed in Ukraine, said governor of Sevastopol, a port city on the Crimea Peninsula, on Sunday. Post-Captain Andrei Paliy, the fleet’s deputy commander, died during fighting in the eastern Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, Mikhail Razvozhayev said on the messaging app Telegram. Sevastopol is the base of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

A report from Geneva, Switzerland, said the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on Sunday said that 10 million Ukrainian refugees have fled abroad or been displaced inside the country in the wake of Russia’s invasion. UN Refugee Agency chief Filippo Grandi said that millions of Ukrainians have been forced to flee their homes due to escalating fights between Russia and Ukraine.