INTENSIFIED ATTACKS
Russian attacks intensified on Ukraine’s battlefields.
The industrial city of Sievierodonetsk, a prime target in Moscow’s offensive to seize full control of Luhansk – one of the two provinces making up the Donbas – faced heavy artillery and rocket fire again as Russian forces attacked areas around it, the Ukrainian military said.
The military’s general staff acknowledged its forces had suffered a setback in the settlement of Metolkine, just southeast of Sievierodonetsk.
“As a result of artillery fire and an assault, the enemy has partial success in the village of Metolkine, trying to gain a foothold,” it said in a Facebook post late on Saturday.
Serhiy Gaidai, the Ukrainian-appointed governor of Luhansk, referred in a separate online post to “tough battles” in Metolkine.
Russia’s Tass news agency, citing a source working for Russian-backed separatists, said many Ukrainian fighters had surrendered in Metolkine.
To the northwest, several Russian missiles hit a gasworks in Izium district, and Russian rockets rained down on a suburb of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, hitting a municipal building and starting a fire in a block of flats, but causing no casualties, Ukrainian authorities said.
Ukrainian authorities also reported shelling of locations further west in Poltava and Dnipropetrovsk, and on Saturday they said three Russian missiles destroyed a fuel storage depot in the town of Novomoskovsk, wounding 11 people, one critically.
The Ukrainian armed forces’ general staff said Russian troops on a reconnaissance mission near the town of Krasnopillya had been beaten back with heavy casualties on Saturday.
Reuters could not independently confirm the battlefield accounts.
ZELENSKIYY DEFIANCE
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiyy, whose defiance has inspired Ukrainians and won him global respect, said in a Telegram post on Saturday he had visited soldiers on the southern front line in the Mykolaiv region, about 550km south of Kyiv.
“I talked to our defenders – the military, the police, the National Guard,” he said in a video on the Telegram message app on Sunday that appeared to have been recorded on a moving train.
“Their mood is assured: They all do not doubt our victory,” Zelenskiyy said. “We will not give the south to anyone, and all that is ours we will take back.”
Another video showed Zelenskiy in his trademark khaki T-shirt handing out medals and posing for selfies with servicemen.
Zelenskiyy’s office said he had also visited National Guard positions in the southern region of Odesa to the west of Mykolaiv. Neither he nor his office said when the trips took place, but he did not deliver his customary nighttime address on Saturday.
He has stayed mostly in Kyiv since Russia invaded, although in recent weeks he has made unannounced visits to Kharkiv and two eastern cities near battles.
One of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s stated goals when he ordered his troops into Ukraine was to halt the eastward expansion of the NATO military alliance and keep Moscow’s southern neighbour outside of the West’s sphere of influence.
But the war, which has killed thousands of people, turned cities into rubble and sent millions fleeing, has had the opposite effect – convincing Finland and Sweden to seek to join NATO – and helping to pave the way for Ukraine’s EU membership bid.
