Ukrainians yesterday were digging in to defend the eastern city of Sievierodonetsk as it endured heavy bombardment from Russian forces trying to take the industrial area known as the Donbas.
Shelling increased in ferocity as Russian and Ukrainian forces battled along a 551km wedge of Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland, driving residents to flee.
“We haven’t been able to see the sun for three months. We are almost blind because we were in darkness for three months,” said Rayisa Rybalko, who fled to Ukrainian-controlled Kiurakhove from the village of Novomykhailivka near the front line in Donetsk. “The world should have seen that.”
Photo: Reuters
She and her family moved to a bomb shelter at a school a day before their house was destroyed in a bombardment. They were awaiting an evacuation bus after a fellow villager drove them to Kiurakhove.
Her son-in-law, Dmytro Khaliapin, said heavy artillery was pounding the village.
“Houses are being ruined,” he said. “It’s a horror.”
Photo: Ukrainian Presidential Press Service via Reuters
Polish President Andrzej Duda traveled to Kyiv on Sunday to support Ukraine’s EU aspirations and addressed Ukraine’s parliament, receiving a standing ovation when he thanked the lawmakers for letting him speak where “the heart of a free, independent and democratic Ukraine beats.”
Ukraine does not have to yield to pressure from Russia and from elsewhere in Europe, Duda said.
“I want to say clearly: Only Ukraine has the right to decide about its future. Only Ukraine has the right to decide for itself,” he said.
Duda, a right-wing populist leader who clearly preferred former US president Donald Trump over US President Joe Biden in the 2020 election, nonetheless said that “Kyiv is the place from which one clearly sees that we need more America in Europe, both in the military and in this economic dimension.”
Poland has become an important ally of Ukraine, welcoming millions of Ukrainian refugees, and becoming a gateway for Western humanitarian aid and weapons, as well as a transit point for some foreign fighters who have volunteered to fight Russian forces.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called Duda’s visit, his second since April, “a historic opportunity not to lose such strong relations, built through blood, through Russian aggression. All this not to lose our state, not to lose our people.”
Zelenskiy has urged the 27-member EU to expedite his nation’s request to join. It is to be discussed at a Brussels summit next month.
On the battlefield, grinding, town-by-town fighting continued as Russian troops try to expand the territory that Moscow-backed separatists have held since 2014 in the Donbas, which includes Luhansk and Donetsk.
Sievierodonetsk is the main city under Ukrainian control in Luhansk Province, whose governor Serhii Haidai accused the Russians of “simply intentionally trying to destroy the city ... engaging in a scorched-earth approach.”
Haidai said the Russians had occupied several towns and cities in Luhansk after indiscriminate, 24-hour shelling and were concentrating forces and weaponry there, bringing in troops from Kharkiv to the northwest, Mariupol to the south, and from inside Russia.
The sole working hospital in the city has only three doctors and supplies for 10 days, he said.
The Ukrainian military said Russian forces were unsuccessful in their attack on Oleksandrivka, a village outside the city.
Ukraine’s parliament on Sunday voted to extend martial law and mobilize its armed forces for a third time, until Aug. 23.
Ukrainian officials have said little since the war began about the extent of their nation’s casualties, but Zelenskiy on Sunday said that 50 to 100 Ukrainian fighters were being killed, apparently each day, in the east.
In a general staff morning report, Russia said it was preparing to resume its offensive on Slovyansk, a city in Donetsk Province that saw fierce fighting last month after Moscow’s troops retreated from Kyiv.
The conflict is not confined to Ukraine’s east.
Powerful explosions were heard early yesterday in Korosten, about 160km west of Kyiv, the town’s deputy mayor said. It was the third straight day of apparent attacks in Zhytomyr District, Ukrainian news agencies reported.
In other developments, Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, gave a rare interview to national broadcaster ICTV alongside her husband and said she has hardly seen him since the war began.
“Our family, like all Ukrainian families, is now separated,” she said, adding that she speaks to him mostly by telephone.
“Unfortunately, we cannot sit together, have dinner with the whole family, talk about everything,” she said.
Zelenskiy called the interview itself “a date on air,” and the couple, who have two children, joked in front of the journalists.
“We are joking, but we are really waiting, like everyone else, to be reunited, like all families in Ukraine who are separated now, waiting for their relatives and friends who want to be together again,” he said.
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