Russian forces on Tuesday stepped up their offensive on the last pocket of resistance around Lugansk in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, as the conflict entered its fourth month.
Since Moscow’s invasion in late February, Western support has helped Ukraine hold off its neighbour’s advances in many areas, including the capital Kyiv. Russia is now focused on securing and expanding its gains in Donbas and the southern coast.
“The most difficult fighting situation today is in Donbas,” Zelensky said, singling out the worst-hit towns of Bakhmut, Popasna and Severodonetsk.
He warned an estimated 15,000 civilians still in the city that it was too late to leave.
“Now I will say: stay in a shelter, because such a density of shelling will not allow us to calmly gather people and come for them.”
Residents of Bakhmut, a crucial junction that serves as a command centre for much of the Ukrainian war effort, told AFP of the aerial onslaught they had suffered.
– ‘Ruthless battle’ –
Zelensky said in his address that Russia had carried out nearly 1,500 missile strikes and more than 3,000 airstrikes against Ukraine in the first three months of the war.
Western countries have sent huge amounts of weapons and cash to Ukraine to help it repel Russia’s assault, and punished Moscow with unprecedented economic sanctions.
Ukrainians were “paying dearly for freedom and independence”, Zelensky said in a video address Monday to world business and political leaders gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba echoed his comments Tuesday, saying the “Russian offensive in the Donbas is a ruthless battle, the largest one on European soil since WWII.
– Mariupol mayor denounces conditions –
“To date, more than 50 kilometres of the coast along the Sea of Azov has been examined and more than 300 various munitions have been neutralised,” it said.
He accused Russia of behaving like a “state terrorist” in his address via videolink. “They keep 100,000 people without water, without food, without electricity.”
Referring to Ukraine’s estimated death toll from the siege of Mariupol, he said: “We see that war already took lives of 20,000 people, and epidemics could take the lives of thousands more.”
A Kyiv court on Monday found a 21-year-old Russian soldier guilty of war crimes for killing an unarmed civilian in northeast Ukraine, in the first verdict of its kind since the invasion began.
The sergeant from Siberia had admitted killing a 62-year-old civilian, Oleksandr Shelipov, as he was riding his bike in the village of Chupakhivka in northeast Ukraine.
In the letter circulated to a number of diplomatic missions in Geneva and seen by AFP, Boris Bondarev condemned the war as “not only a crime against the Ukrainian people but also, perhaps, the most serious crime against the people of Russia”.