A delegation of leaders and senior officials from Africa, including South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, arrived in Ukraine on Friday seeking ways to end the invaded country’s near 16-month war with Russia and to ensure food and fertiliser deliveries to their continent.
An air raid in Kyiv during their trip provided a reminder of the challenges they face.
Mr Ramaphosa’s press service said that he was met by a Ukrainian special envoy and South Africa’s ambassador at a rail station near Bucha, the Kyiv suburb where bodies of civilians lay scattered in the streets following Russian forces’ withdrawal last spring.
The Bucha visit was symbolically significant, as its name has come to stand for the barbarity of Moscow’s military since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The brutal Russian occupation of Bucha left hundreds of civilians dead in the streets and in mass graves.
The African delegation also includes senior officials from Zambia, Senegal, Uganda, Egypt, the Republic of the Congo and the Comoro Islands.
Mr Ramaphosa said last month that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Russian president Vladimir Putin had agreed to separate meetings with the delegation.
The delegation was set to travel to St Petersburg later on Friday, where Russia’s top international economic conference is taking place, and meet with Mr Putin on Saturday.
Officials who helped prepare the talks said the African leaders not only aimed to initiate a peace process but also assess how Russia, which is under heavy international sanctions, can be paid for the fertiliser exports Africa desperately needs.
They are also set to discuss the related issue of ensuring more grain shipments out of Ukraine amid the war and the possibility of more prisoner swaps.
The African peace overture comes as Ukraine launches a counteroffensive to dislodge the Kremlin’s forces from occupied areas, using Western-supplied advanced weapons in attacks along the 600-mile front line.
Western analysts and military officials have cautioned that the campaign could last a long time.
China has also been working on a peace proposal, but it appears to have few chances of success as the warring sides appear no closer to a ceasefire.
Ukrainian troops recorded successes along three stretches of the front line in the country’s south and east, a spokesman for Ukraine’s general staff said in a statement on Friday.
According to Andriy Kovalev, Ukrainian forces have moved forward south of the town of Orikhiv in the Zaporizhzhia region, in the direction of the village of Robotyne, as well as around Levadne and Staromaiorske, on the boundary between Zaporizhzhia and the Donetsk province further east.
Kovalev also said that Ukrainian troops advanced in some areas around Vuhledar, a mining town in Donetsk that was the site of one of the main tank battles in the war so far.
It was not possible to independently verify the claims.
Russian shelling on Thursday and overnight killed two civilians and wounded two others in the southern Kherson region, its governor, Oleksandr Prokudin, said.
Russian forces over the previous day launched 54 strikes across the province, using mortars, artillery, multiple rocket launchers, drones, missiles and aircraft, according to Mr Prokudin.
Ten people were wounded over that same period in the eastern Donetsk region, local governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said.
