For the second time, the ceasefire has failed. The temporary pause in hostilities to facilitate a humanitarian corridor allowing ordinary people to leave Mariupol (Donetsk) did not hold, and only a few hundred of the 400,000 residents achieved the goal of leaving the city located on the coast of the Sea of Azov. Amid the continuing destruction by Russian troops and new threats from Putin reaffirming his will to achieve his goals either militarily or through diplomacy, the Russian president's relentless assault has only been reaffirmed. Destruction of cities through war and an apparently fruitless diplomatic route with French president Emmanuel Macron or Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett.
That the only alternative suggested for intervention in the conflict by the European Union's high representative for foreign affairs, Josep Borrell, has been to demand that China be the mediator, that he has confidence in them and that there is no alternative, sounds dangerous and reckless. First of all, it does a great disservice to the European Union, moving it to one side as an actor in the conflict. But more important than all this is that China has its own agenda and interests in the conflict, despite having dialectically taken a position that seems far removed from that of the invader Moscow. Before placing itself desperately into the hands of China, the European Union should play its own cards and look for a personality like Angela Merkel who could untangle the web of belligerence being woven by Borrell.
On the twelfth day of the invasion of Ukraine, the absence of direct news from Russia is beginning to be noticed, after Vladimir Putin approved, through the Duma, harsh punishments for journalists who publish "misinformation", including sentences of up to fifteen years in prison. The international media blackout there has been complete and it will be difficult to know how people really are in Moscow and other cities of the invasion, while arrests of protesters continue to take place in the hundreds. Added to this blackout is the lack of information for domestic consumption as the Kremlin has closed down those media which it doesn't control.
It is well known that, in a war, truth is the first casualty and, of what we are reading now, we will eventually learn, long after the fact, that parts of it were more propaganda than information. But in spite of everything, there is a job to be done on the ground by many journalists that is both desirable and essential in order to reduce or accompany the information that cannot be properly checked because it relates to the most chaotic area of the conflict. For Putin to expel them from Russia - because that's what he did - makes it clear that he does not want witnesses to the atrocities he may commit, nor that we have any idea about the level of opposition among the population to a war which increasingly seem, at least in part, more like Putin's War rather than Russia's War.