Zelenskyj’s advisor on Putin’s visit: “He admires the mass graves”

The Ukrainian port city of Mariupol in the Donetsk region lay in ruins after brutal fighting that was among the bloodiest of the war.

Previously, Ukrainian authorities estimated that at least 25,000 people were killed in the fighting around Mariupol and that between 5,000 and 7,000 of them died in the rubble of bombed houses, NTB writes. According to the UN, 90 percent of the residential buildings in the city were destroyed or damaged.

Sentenced

Mariupol was besieged by Russian forces for several months before finally falling in May. The capture of the city was Russia’s first major victory in the war.

Putin traveled to the city by helicopter this weekend. Therefore state news agency He is said to have visited several parts of the city by car and talked to people about the reconstruction. The news agency writes that Putin spoke to several residents and accepted an invitation to come home to visit a local family. In the past, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu also visited Mariupol.

The visit is condemned by several Ukrainian leaders.

– The perpetrator is always drawn to the crime scene. While the countries of the civilized world are announcing that they will arrest the “war director” (Putin) if he crosses their borders, the organizer of the murder of thousands of Mariupol families has come to admire the city’s ruins and mass graves. It is a form of cynicism and unrepentance, writes President Volodymyr Zelenskyi’s adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak Twitter.

“Bloody Dictator”

Putin visited Mariupol after being in Crimea, according to the Kremlin. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov claims the visit to the port city was spontaneous. It comes after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a war crimes arrest warrant against him.

The Mariupol City Council, now operating from Ukrainian-controlled territory, also condemned the visit in an announcement on telegram.

– Mariupol was a fatal mistake of a bloody dictator. It showed the true face of the “Russian world” — Russian terror and cruelty, they write.

Russia’s warfare in Mariupol has been heavily criticized from several quarters. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) considers a Russian bombing of a maternity hospital early in the war to be a war crime.

First visit to Donbass

It is Putin’s first trip to the Donbass region, which consists of Donetsk and Luhansk, since the war broke out, and his next trip to the frontlines of the war since he decided to invade the neighboring country, NTB writes.

While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy repeatedly visited soldiers at the front to boost morale, Putin mostly stayed in the Kremlin, where he led the “military special operation”.

One of Putin’s pretexts for invading Ukraine was to protect the region’s Russian-speaking people from alleged genocide. Russia has been supporting separatists there since 2014, when the Crimean peninsula was annexed. Donetsk is one of the four regions that Russia is said to have incorporated.