Kyiv, Ukraine –
Russia launched an offensive in eastern Ukraine on Sunday as the Polish president traveled to Kyiv to support the country’s bid for the European Union, becoming the first foreign leader to address the Ukrainian parliament since the start of the war.
Deputies applauded President Andrzej Duda, who thanked them for the honor of speaking where the heart of a free, independent and democratic Ukraine was beating. Duda said that in order to end the conflict, Ukraine should not comply with the conditions set by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Unfortunately, alarming voices have also been heard in Europe recently demanding that Ukraine succumb to Putin’s demands,” he said. “I want to make it clear: only Ukraine has the right to decide on its future. Only Ukraine has the right to decide for itself. “
Duda’s second visit to Kyiv in April came as Russian and Ukrainian forces fought along a 551-kilometer (342-mile) wedge from the country’s eastern industrial center.
After declaring full control of large-scale offshore steel production, the last defensive in the port city of Mariupol, Russia launched artillery and missile attacks to expand the territory Moscow-backed separatists have held since 2014 in the region known as Donbass.
To bolster its defense, Ukraine’s parliament voted Sunday to extend the martial law and mobilize the armed forces for a third time by August 23rd.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stressed that the 27-nation EU must speed up his country’s request to join the bloc. Ukraine’s potential candidacy is yet to be discussed at a summit in Brussels in late June.
France’s European Affairs Minister Clement Bonn told Radio J on Sunday that it would be “a long time” before Ukraine could join the EU, perhaps in two decades.
“We have to be honest,” he said. “If you say that Ukraine will join the EU in six months, a year or two, you are lying.
But Poland is stepping up its efforts to win over EU members who are more hesitant about admitting Ukraine to the bloc. Zelenski said Duda’s visit was a “historic union” between Ukraine, which declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, and Poland, which had ended communist rule two years earlier.
“This is really a historic opportunity not to lose such a strong relationship, built through blood, through Russian aggression,” Zelensky said. All this so that we do not lose our country, so that we do not lose our people.
Poland has welcomed millions of Ukrainian refugees and become a portal for Western humanitarian aid and weapons in Ukraine. It is also a transit point for some foreign fighters who have volunteered to fight Russian forces.
Duda blamed the United States and President Joe Biden for uniting the West in support of Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Moscow.
“Kyiv is a place where you can clearly see that we need more America in Europe, both militarily and economically,” said Duda, a right-wing populist leader who clearly prefers former President Donald Trump to Biden in 2020. elections.
On the battlefield, Russia appears to have made slow, steady strides in the Donbass in recent days. It has stepped up efforts to seize Severodonetsk, the Ukrainian-controlled capital of Luhansk province, which, along with Donetsk province, makes up Donbass. The Ukrainian military said on Sunday that Russian forces had launched an unsuccessful attack on Alexandrovka, a village outside Severodonetsk.
Severodonetsk came under heavy fire, and Luhansk Governor Sergei Haidai said the Russians were “just deliberately trying to destroy the city … by approaching the burned land.”
Haidai said Moscow was concentrating forces and weapons there to try to gain control of Luhansk by deploying forces from Kharkiv to the northwest, Mariupol to the south and inside Russia.
The only working hospital in the city has only three doctors and supplies in 10 days, he said.
Ukrainian authorities have said little since the start of the war about the size of their country’s casualties, but Zelensky told a news conference on Sunday that 50 to 100 Ukrainian fighters had been killed, apparently every day, in the east.
In a morning report to the General Staff, Russia said it was also preparing to resume its offensive against Slavyansk, a city in Donetsk province where fierce fighting took place last month after Moscow’s troops withdrew from Kyiv.
In Enerhodar, a Russian-controlled city 281 kilometers (174 miles) northwest of Mariupol, an explosion on Sunday wounded Moscow-appointed mayors at his residence, Ukrainian and Russian news agencies reported. The Ukrainian news agency Unian reported that a bomb planted by “local guerrillas” wounded 48-year-old Andrei Shevchuk, whose life is near the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe.
As Russia claims to have captured nearly 2,500 Ukrainian fighters from Mariupol’s steel industry, fears of their fate and that of other residents of the city, which is now in ruins with more than 20,000 dead, are growing.
Relatives of the fighters pleaded for them to be given rights as prisoners of war and eventually return to Ukraine. Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk said Ukraine “will fight for the return” of each of them.
Denis Pushilin, the pro-Kremlin leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, has vowed that Ukrainian fighters from the plant will face a tribunal.
The complete takeover of the Azovstal steel plant, a symbol of Ukraine’s tenacity, gave Putin a much-coveted victory in the war that began nearly three months ago, on February 24. The Ukrainian military told the fighters that their mission was complete and they could come outside. She describes their retrieval as an evacuation, not a mass transfer.
Mariupol Mayor Vadim Boychenko warned that the city was facing a health and sanitation “catastrophe” from mass burials in shallow pits and damage to the sewer system. Approximately 100,000 of the 450,000 people who lived in Mariupol before the war remain.
Ukrainian authorities say Russian atrocities have taken place there, including attacks on a maternity hospital and a theater where hundreds of civilians have taken refuge.
Meanwhile, a Ukrainian court was expected to hand down a sentence Monday for a Russian soldier who was the first to stand trial for an alleged war crime. The 21-year-old sergeant, who admitted to shooting a Ukrainian man in the head in a village in the northeastern Sumy region on February 28, could face up to life in prison if convicted.
Ukraine’s chief prosecutor, Irina Venediktov, said her service is prosecuting war crimes cases against 41 Russian soldiers for crimes involving bombing of civilian infrastructure, killing civilians, rape and robbery.
In other events, Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Zelenska gave a rare interview to national television ICTV with her husband, saying she had hardly seen him since the start of the war.
“Our family, like all Ukrainian families, is now divided,” she said, adding that she spoke to him mostly on the phone.
“Unfortunately, we can’t sit together, have dinner with the whole family, talk about everything,” she said.
Zelenski called the interview a “meeting on air”, and the couple, who have two children, joked to reporters.
“We are joking, but we are really waiting, like everyone else, to get together, like all families in Ukraine who are separated now, we are waiting for our relatives and friends who want to be together again,” he said.
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Bekatoros reported from Donetsk. Associated Press journalists Juras Karmanau from Lviv, Andrea Rosa in Kharkiv and other PA officials around the world contributed.
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