Nearly three months after Russia shocked the world by invading Ukraine, its military faces a stalemate, the prospect of a larger NATO and an adversary backed on Sunday by victories on and off the battlefield.
Senior NATO diplomats met with the alliance’s chief in Berlin and said the war was “not going as Moscow had planned”.
“Ukraine can win this war,” said NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, adding that the alliance must continue to offer military support to Kyiv. He spoke via video link about the meeting while recovering from a COVID-19 infection.
On the diplomatic front, both Finland and Sweden have taken steps to bring them closer to NATO membership, despite Russia’s objections. Finland announced on Sunday that it is seeking to join NATO, citing how the invasion has changed Europe’s security landscape. Hours later, Sweden’s ruling party approved the country’s own candidacy for membership, which could lead to days of application.
If the two non-aligned Scandinavian countries became part of the alliance, it would be an insult to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who cited NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe after the Cold War as a threat to Russia. NATO says it is a purely defensive alliance.
Ukrainian servicemen squat during a patrol in a recently captured village north of Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine, Sunday, May 15, 2022. Mstislav Chernov / AP
While Moscow lost its position on the diplomatic front, Russian forces also failed to achieve territorial success in eastern Ukraine.
Ukraine has said it is holding back Russian offensives in the east, and the Western military has said a campaign Moscow launched there after its forces failed to capture the capital, Kyiv, has slowed at a snail’s pace.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is celebrating a victory to boost morale in the Eurovision Song Contest. The Kalush Folk Rap Ensemble won the glamorous pan-European competition with its song “Stephanie”, which became a popular anthem among Ukrainians during the war.
President Vladimir Zelensky has vowed that his nation will claim the winner’s usual honor of hosting the next annual competition.
“Step by step, we are forcing the occupiers to leave Ukrainian soil,” Zelensky said.
The band’s frontman Oleh Psyuk told a news conference on Sunday that the musicians were “ready to fight” when they returned home. The Ukrainian government has banned men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country, but six members of the all-male group have been given special permission to go to Italy to represent Ukraine in the competition.
They will return to a country that is still struggling to survive.
Russian and Ukrainian fighters take part in a tough battle for the country’s eastern industrial center, Donbass. Ukraine’s most experienced and best-equipped troops have fought Moscow-backed separatists in the east for eight years.
Even with its failures, Russia continues to inflict death and destruction on Ukraine. Over the weekend, its forces struck a chemical plant and 11 high-rise buildings in Severodonetsk, Donbass, the district governor said. Governor Sergiy Haidai said two people were killed in the shelling and warned residents still in the city to stay in underground shelters.
Russian missiles destroyed “military infrastructure” in the Yavoriv region of western Ukraine, near the border with Poland, the Lviv region governor said.
Lviv is a major gateway to Western-supplied weapons that Ukraine acquired during the war.
The Ukrainian military said it had refrained from a renewed Russian offensive in the Dontesk region of Donbas. Russian troops also tried to advance near the eastern city of Izyum, but were stopped by Ukrainian forces, said Kharkiv Oblast Governor Oleg Sinegubov.
Ukraine’s allegations could not be verified independently, but Western authorities also painted a grim picture of Russia.
The British Ministry of Defense said in its daily intelligence update that the Russian army had lost up to a third of the fighting force it had provided to Ukraine in late February and had failed to gain any significant territory.
“Under the current conditions, Russia is unlikely to accelerate dramatically in the next 30 days,” the ministry said on Twitter.
Estimates of Russia’s military performance came as Russian troops withdrew from Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, a key military target earlier in the war and bombed for weeks. The regional governor said there had been no shelling in the city for several days, although Russia continued to strike in the wider Kharkiv region.
A Ukrainian battalion fighting in the region reached the border with Russia on Sunday and made a winning video there, addressed to Zelensky.
In the video posted on Facebook by the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, a dozen fighters stood around a blue-yellow post, the color of Ukraine.
One explained that the unit had gone “to the dividing line with the Russian Federation, the occupying country. Mr. President, we have reached it. Here we are.”
As he spoke, other fighters signaled victory and raised their fists.
After failing to take Kyiv, Putin shifted the focus of the Donbass invasion, aiming to seize territory not yet occupied by Moscow-backed separatists.
In the southern Donbass, the port of the Sea of Azov, Mariupol, is now largely under Russian control, with the exception of several hundred Ukrainian soldiers who refused to surrender and remained in hiding at the Azovstal steel plant.
Many of their wives called on the world community to secure the release of “the entire garrison” during an online press conference. The women painted a grim picture of the situation of the troops, saying they were suffering from severe shortages of food, water and medicine; untreated injuries sometimes lead to sepsis.
Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office says regional prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation into Moscow’s alleged use of limited incendiary bombs at the steel plant. International law allows certain use of incendiary munitions, but prohibits their use for direct targeting of enemy personnel or civilians.
A spokesman for Turkish President Ibrahim Kalin said the country had offered to evacuate wounded Ukrainian soldiers and civilians by ship from Azovstal, according to official state television TRT.
The invasion of Ukraine has worried other countries on Russia’s flank that they could be next, including Finland, which shares both the 1,340-kilometer (830-mile) land border and the Gulf of Finland with Russia. Putin told Finnish President Sauli Niinisto in a telephone conversation on Saturday that joining NATO would be a “mistake”.
In neighboring Sweden, after the ruling Social Democratic Party backed plans to join NATO on Sunday, the plan was due to be discussed in parliament on Monday, following a cabinet statement.
However, NATO is acting by consensus and potential Scandinavian bids have been called into question by fears of Turkey. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said he had discussed Turkey’s concerns at the NATO summit, especially Sweden’s and Finland’s alleged support for Kurdish rebel groups and their restrictions on arms sales to Turkey.
But during a Sunday visit to Sweden, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said Finland and Sweden would be “important additions” to NATO and that the United States must ratify its membership quickly. McConnell is leading a delegation of Republican senators in the region. They paid a surprise visit to Kyiv on Saturday in support.
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