KYIV (REUTERS) - Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday (March 19) called for comprehensive peace talks with Moscow, saying Russia would otherwise need generations to recover from losses suffered during the war.
Mr Zelensky said Ukraine had always offered solutions for peace, and wanted meaningful and honest negotiations on peace and security without delay.
"I want everyone to hear me now, especially in Moscow. The time has come for a meeting. It is time to talk," he said in a video address released in the early hours of Saturday.
"The time has come to restore territorial integrity and justice for Ukraine. Otherwise, Russia's losses will be such that it will take you several generations to recover."
The two sides have been involved in talks for weeks with no sign of a breakthrough.
Mr Zelensky said Russian forces were deliberately blocking the supply of humanitarian supplies to cities under attack.
"This is a deliberate tactic... This is a war crime and they will answer for it, 100%," he said.
Russia’s defence ministry said on Saturday it had destroyed a large underground depot for missiles and aircraft ammunition in Ukraine’s Ivano-Frankivsk region using hypersonic missiles, the Interfax news agency reported.
The ministry said it had also destroyed Ukrainian military radio and reconnaissance centres near the port city of Odessa using a coastal missile system.
Mr Zelensky meanwhile said there was no information about how many people had died after a theatre in the city of Mariupol, where hundreds of people had been sheltering, was struck on Wednesday.
More than 130 people had been rescued so far, he said, adding that Ukrainian authorities had also been able to rescue more than 9,000 people from the south-eastern port city, which is under siege by Russian forces.
More than 180,000 Ukrainian citizens had been rescued through humanitarian corridors across the country, Mr Zelensky said.
Ukraine hopes to evacuate civilians on Saturday via ten humanitarian corridors from cities and towns on the frontline of fighting with Russian forces, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said.
She said a corridor had been agreed for Mariupol, although the authorities’ previous efforts to evacuate civilians there under a temporary ceasefire have mostly failed, with both sides trading blame.
Earlier on Saturday, the governor of the eastern Luhansk region said a humanitarian corridor for evacuations will be opened there.
“A humanitarian corridor has been agreed, we will try to evacuate people and bring food today. A ‘regime of silence’ has been agreed for March 19, starting at 9am (3pm Singapore time),” Serhiy Gaiday said on Telegram.
Elsewhere, the Ukrainian military announced it was imposing a 38-hour curfew in the south-eastern city of Zaporizhzhia, starting at 4pm local time (10pm Singapore time) on Saturday and ending early on Monday, deputy mayor Anatoliy Kurtiev said.
“Do not go outside at this time!” he said in an online post.
The regional capital has become an important point of transit for some of the 35,000 people estimated to have fled nearby Mariupol.
Several rounds of negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow have taken place both in person and virtually since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began on Feb 24.
The latest set of talks, the fourth, opened on Monday.
Russia’s top negotiator said on Friday that Moscow and Kyiv had brought their positions “as close as possible” on a proposal for Ukraine to become a neutral state.
But Mr Mikhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Mr Zelensky taking part in the negotiations, said his country’s position had not budged.
“Negotiation status. The statements of the Russian side are only their requesting positions,” he wrote on Twitter.
“All statements are intended, inter alia, to provoke tension in the media. Our positions are unchanged - ceasefire, withdrawal of troops and strong security guarantees with concrete formulas.”
Russia has requested that its neighbour never join the Western Nato military alliance, as well as demanding its “demilitarisation” and “denazification”.
