Ukraine’s president accuses Russia of waging ‘total war’
By ELENA BECATOROS, OLEKSANDR STASHEVSKYI and RICARDO MAZALAN
Associated Press
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of waging “total war,” seeking to inflict as much death and destruction as possible as in three months of conflict, as fighting raged Tuesday in the eastern Donbas region.
Russian forces have intensified efforts to encircle and capture Sievierodonetsk and neighboring cities, the only part of the Donbas’ Luhansk region that remains under Ukrainian government control, British military authorities said.
That battle is only one part of the Russian campaign to take the Donbas, which is now the Kremlin’s focus after its forces failed to overrun Kyiv in the early weeks of the war and were forced to withdraw and pursue more a limited objective. But its troops have become bogged down again in the eastern industrial heartland of coal mines and factories.
Russian forces have achieved “some localized successes” despite strong Ukrainian resistance along dug-in positions, the U.K. Defense Ministry said, but the fall of Sievierodonetsk and the area around it may cause logistical problems for the Russians.
“If the Donbas front line moves further west, this will extend Russian lines of communication and likely see its forces face further logistic resupply difficulties,” the ministry said.
On the eve of the three-month anniversary of the start of the war, Zelensky told Ukrainians that Russia is waging “total war, when the enemy tries to destroy as many people and infrastructure as possible.”
“Indeed, there has not been such a war on the European continent for 77 years,” he said in his address Thursday night.
He pointed to a missile attack that killed 87 people last week in the town of Desna, 55 kilometers (35 miles) north of Kyiv, one of the deadliest single strikes in the war.
“And it was only four missiles,” he said, noting the many hundreds of such strikes since the beginning of the war on Feb. 24.
In its effort to secure a victory in the Donbas, Moscow has withdrawn some forces from around Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv.
There, residents lined up for rations of tea, sugar, pasta and cereal, holding out plastic bags to receive cups of flour and other supplies.
Meanwhile, a Russian-installed official in Ukraine’s Kherson region said the pro-Kremlin administration will ask Moscow to set up a military base there.
“It is vitally important and will become a security guarantee for the region and its residents,” said Kirill Stremousov, deputy head of the administration.
Ukrainian officials have speculated Russia plans to stage a referendum in the region to declare its independence, similar to ones held years ago in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of the Donbas. Moscow recognized the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics two days before invading Ukraine, using that as a pretext to send troops to its ex-Soviet neighbor.
Instead, Stremousov said the region would ask the Kremlin to make it part of Russia. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said it is up to the people of Kherson to decide how and where they want to live.
Meeting in Tokyo with fellow leaders in the Indo-Pacific security coalition known as the Quad, President Joe Biden said Tuesday that Russia’s war in Ukraine had brought a “dark hour in our shared history.”
Global defense leaders on Monday agreed to send more advanced weapons to Ukraine, including a Harpoon launcher and missiles to protect its coast, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters.
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Becatoros reported from Kramatorsk, Ukraine. Associated Press journalists Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Andrea Rosa in Kharkiv, Danica Kirka in London and other AP staffers around the world contributed.
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