Ukraine has said it will not agree to a ceasefire agreement that would include a surrender on Russian territory, as Moscow stepped up its attack in the eastern Donbass region on Sunday.
“The war must end with the full restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty,” Ukrainian President Andriy Ermak said in a Twitter post.
Polish President Andrzej Duda offered support to Warsaw, telling politicians in Kyiv that the international community must demand Russia’s complete withdrawal and that sacrificing any part of Ukraine would be a “huge blow” to the West.
“There have been alarming voices saying that Ukraine must yield to Putin’s demands,” Duda said in his first personal address to the Ukrainian parliament by a foreign leader since Russia’s February 24th invasion. “Only Ukraine has the right to decide its future,” he said.
On Saturday, Ukraine’s chief negotiator in troubled peace talks, Mikhail Podoliak, said: “Any concession to Russia is not a path to peace, but a war postponed for several years. Ukraine trades neither its sovereignty nor its territories and the Ukrainians living in them.
Hours earlier, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky had suggested that his government was ready to resume talks with Russia, as long as Moscow did not kill Ukrainian troops defending the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol.
Following calls for an immediate ceasefire from US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, Podoliak made it clear that Ukraine would not accept any deal with Russia involving ceding territory and agreed to a ceasefire now while making concessions to Russia would have the opposite effect on Ukraine, because “Moscow would retaliate more strongly after any cessation of hostilities.”
Meanwhile, on Sunday, Russian forces continued to bomb Ukrainian cities on the front line, conducting a major offensive in Luhansk, one of the two provinces that make up Donbass. Moscow’s goal – after taking full control of the port city of Mariupol, in what was perhaps the biggest takeover of Moscow in nearly three months of war – is to seize the remaining Ukrainian-held territory in the region and gain military momentum.
Controlling Mariupol gives Russia command of a land route connecting the Crimean peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014, to mainland Russia and parts of eastern Ukraine held by pro-Russian separatists.
Shelling and rocket attacks hit Kharkiv in northern Ukraine and Nikolaev and Zaporozhye in the south, while eight civilians were killed on the eastern front in Donbass, Ukrainian authorities said.
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Major General Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman for Ukraine’s defense ministry, said Russian missiles had struck a mobile anti-drone system near the village of Hanivka, about 60 miles (100km) northeast of the city of Nikolaev.
On the Donetsk front, Russian forces tried to break through Ukraine’s defenses to reach the administrative borders of Luhansk Oblast, while further north, heavy shelling of Severodonetsk and Lisichansk continued, according to Ukraine’s General Staff.
Severodonetsk and Lisichansk, its sister city on the other side of the Seversky Donets River, form the eastern part of Ukraine’s pocket, which Russia has been trying to capture since mid-April after failing to capture Kyiv and shift its focus east and south. .
Luhansk Oblast Governor Sergei Haidai said that although Severodonetsk had been attacked by “four separate directions”, Russian forces had failed to penetrate the city.
The Russian army rallied the Black Sea port of Mariupol during its siege and subjected Ukrainian troops and cities to the east to relentless ground and artillery attacks.
“There are no jobs, no food, no water,” said Angela Kopitsa, 52, in tears as she spoke to AFP reporters during a Russian tour of Mariupol. Kopitsa said her home and life had been destroyed during the fighting and that children in maternity wards were starving.
AFP, the Associated Press and Reuters contributed to the report
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