The war in Ukraine continues and Moscow has faced condemnation from the International Court of Justice for its aggression. Meanwhile diplomacy keeps working. The war in Ukraine continues and Moscow has faced condemnation from the International Court of Justice for its aggression. Meanwhile diplomacy keeps working.
It has been three weeks since the war in Ukraine began. While Russia continues to bomb cities indiscriminately and the death toll rises without pause, diplomatic efforts to bring the violence to an end are ongoing but have so far yielded no result. On 16 March, however, the Financial Times announced the possibility of a breakthrough, with a draft agreement that Kyiv and Moscow are said to be working on already at an advanced stage. In the background, the ruling of the International Court of Justice, which ordered Russia to suspend its military aggression.
At roughly the same time as Moscow bombed a theatre in Mariupol in which more than a thousand people, including many children, had taken shelter, the International Court of Justice convened to pass judgement on Russia's aggression against Ukraine over the past three weeks.
Since 24 February, the day Russian president Vladimir Putin launched the air raids and the ground invasion, Ukraine has plunged into the abyss. 400,000 people are trapped without drinking water, electricity or heating in Mariupol, besieged by Russian troops and razed to the ground in some neighbourhoods. Similar situations affect cities such as Kharkiv and Chernihiv, where on 15 March a Russian attack struck and killed 10 civilians queuing for bread. Bombardments are continuing on the capital Kyiv as well, where air-raid sirens almost never stop sounding, while Moscow has also begun targeting western cities close to the European Union border. Despite this, the ground advance by Russian troops is growing ever slower and, apart from Kherson and a number of smaller towns, Ukrainian resistance is holding across the rest of the country for the time being.
According to the United Nations, the number of people who have managed to flee Ukraine so far stands at three million. The officially recorded civilian death toll in the country is 726, but the inaccessibility of many areas makes the count difficult: the Kyiv Ministry of Defence has said that in Mariupol alone as many as 20,000 people may have been killed, so much so that the word genocide is already being used. And the judges of the International Court of Justice in The Hague convened on 16 March to assess the ongoing aggression, following an explicit request made on 26 February by the Kyiv authorities. With 13 votes in favour and only China and Russia itself voting against, they ruled that Moscow must bring its invasion of Ukraine to an end. The court said there are no grounds underpinning the Russian attack, dismissing the genocide accusations against the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass areas that Vladimir Putin used as a pretext for the attack.
"Ukraine has achieved a complete victory in its case against Russia before the Court," announced Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Despite this, the ruling will be ignored by Moscow given that there is no way to make it binding. For Moscow it will be a further reputational blow, yet more evidence of its disregard for the rules of international law.
In recent days Ukrainian president Zelensky has been addressing the parliaments of the main western countries to raise further awareness of what is happening in his country. On 16 March it was the turn of the US Congress, on 17 March the German Bundestag, and on 22 March it will be Montecitorio's turn. Meanwhile the fourth round of peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine is continuing. Having begun on 15 March by video conference rather than in person as the previous rounds had been, it was suspended for technical breaks and then resumed. The digital format also makes it harder to understand when and how the talks are progressing.
Among what has emerged in recent hours, Ukraine has been asked to adopt an Austrian or Swedish-style neutral position. Vienna is not part of Nato by virtue of a memorandum signed with the Soviets in the 1950s, after the end of the occupation by the USA, Great Britain, France and the USSR itself. Sweden, meanwhile, has always maintained a conventional neutrality that kept it out of the wars of the last century on the European continent. Kyiv has nonetheless refused to submit to these models, even though in recent days President Zelensky had said he acknowledged that his country would not be joining the Atlantic Alliance.
Meanwhile the Financial Times has reported news of a draft peace agreement that the two countries are said to be working on and which is allegedly already at an advanced stage of drafting. The American newspaper is said to have received the information from Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to Zelensky, who spoke of a 15-point programme. Among these, the most important would be a ceasefire and the withdrawal of Moscow's troops from Ukrainian territory in exchange for Kyiv announcing its neutrality. Ukrainian authorities have stressed that the document reflects the Russian positions, while the Ukrainian ones are not contained within it, apart from the request for a ceasefire. In any case, between rounds of negotiations and drafts that are more or less denied, and while Russian aggression continues on the ground, the only good news is that behind the scenes diplomacy continues to work to try to resolve the situation.
