Russia unleashes offensive into east Ukraine: Zelensky
KYIV, Ukraine — Russia launched a major offensive into eastern Ukraine on Monday, authorities in Kyiv said, as Moscow opened a new phase of its invasion after being thwarted in efforts to capture the capital.
In recent weeks, Russia's military campaign has refocused on the eastern region of Donbas, which pro-Moscow separatists have partly controlled since 2014.
"We can now confirm that Russian troops have begun the battle for the Donbas, which they have been preparing for a long time," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Telegram late Monday.
"No matter how many Russian soldiers are brought here, we will fight. We will defend ourselves."
Ahead of the widely anticipated advance, Ukrainian authorities had urged people in Donbas to flee west to escape.
Control of Donbas would allow Moscow to create a southern corridor to the occupied Crimean peninsula.
In the south of Donbas, Russia continued its push to capture the besieged port city of Mariupol, where the last remaining Ukrainian forces have taken a final stand.
Russia on Monday also pounded targets across the country, killing at least seven people in the far western city of Lviv.
Lviv has largely been spared bombardment since Russia invaded on February 24, and the city and its surroundings had become a haven for those seeking safety from the war zone.
But "today we understood clearly that we don't have any safe places in Ukraine. It's very dangerous," a bank employee who gave her name as Natalia told AFP after the strikes.
Strikes across Ukraine
Russia's defence ministry said Monday it had hit 16 military targets across Ukraine.
Among the sites struck was a depot near Lviv that Moscow said held weapons recently delivered to Ukraine from the United States and Europe.
Shipments of the latest $800-million US military aid package, which includes helicopters, howitzers and armoured personnel carriers, have arrived at Ukraine's borders, a Pentagon official said Monday.
Shortly before Zelensky's address, the regional governor of the Lugansk region Sergiy Gaiday also announced the beginning of Russia's much-anticipated attack.
"It's hell. The offensive has begun, the one we've been talking about for weeks. There's constant fighting in Rubizhne and Popasna, fighting in other peaceful cities," he said on Facebook.
Russian shelling killed at least eight civilians in eastern Ukraine, according to local authorities.
Gaiday said four people died as they tried to flee the city of Kreminna in Lugansk as Russian troops moved in.
"The Russian army has already entered there, with a huge amount of military hardware... Our defenders have retreated to new positions," Gaiday said in a statement on social media.
But Ukrainian presidential advisor Oleksiy Arestovich said Russian forces had not conquered the city.
Ukrainian officials on Monday halted the evacuation of civilians from frontline towns and cities in the east for a second day, accusing Russian forces of having blocked and shelled escape routes.
Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk urged Moscow to open humanitarian corridors from Mariupol to Berdyansk and from the Azovstal metallurgical industrial zone -- a holdout for Ukrainian fighters.
"Your refusal to open these humanitarian corridors will, in the future, be grounds for prosecuting all those involved in war crimes," she said on Telegram.
War crimes
President Vladimir Putin has said he launched the military operation on February 24 to save Russian-speakers in Ukraine from a "genocide" carried out by a "neo-Nazi" regime.
He recognised the independence of two self-proclaimed separatist republics in Donetsk and Lugansk shortly before the invasion began.
On Monday, Putin lauded the 64th Motor Rifle Brigade — which is accused of committing atrocities near Kyiv — bestowing battle honours on them for "heroism and valour, tenacity and courage".
Ukraine has alleged the brigade is guilty of war crimes while occupying the suburb of Bucha on the outskirts of Kyiv, where residents were shot dead, some with their hands bound.
The European Union condemned Russia's "indiscriminate" bombing of Ukrainian civilians following the strikes on Lviv.
Its foreign policy chief Josep Borrell pointed to "particularly heavy attacks" in eastern and southern Ukraine and an offensive against second city Kharkiv, where officials said Russian shelling killed three people.
"Attacks on Lviv and other cities in western Ukraine show that no part of the country is spared from the Kremlin's senseless onslaught," Borrell added.
Seeking to strengthen ties and accelerate admission to the 27-nation bloc, Zelensky said that Ukraine hoped to receive EU candidate country status within weeks.
On Monday, he handed the EU's envoy to Kyiv a two-volume response to a membership questionnaire brought by European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen in March.
President Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday secured Turkey's crucial backing for Ukraine's NATO aspirations after winning a US pledge for cluster munitions that could inflict massive damage on Russian forces on the battlefield.
Washington's decision to deliver the controversial weapons — banned across a large part of the world but not in Russia or Ukraine — dramatically ups the stakes in the war, which entered its 500th day Saturday.
Zelensky has been travelling across Europe trying to secure bigger and better weapons for his outmatched army, which has launched a long-awaited counteroffensive that is progressing less swiftly than Ukraine's allies had hoped. — AFP
Washington's decision to supply Ukraine with ATACMS long-range missiles is "a grave mistake", Russian ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov says Wednesday.
"The White House's decision to send long-range missiles to Ukrainians is a grave mistake. The consequences of this step, which was deliberately hidden from the public, will be of the most serious nature," he says in a statement. — AFP
President Vladimir Putin says Sunday that Russian forces had made gains in their Ukraine offensive including in Avdiivka, a symbolic industrial hub.
"Our troops are improving their position in almost all of this area, which is quite vast," he says in an interview on Russian television, an extract of which was posted on social media on Sunday. "This concerns the areas of Kupiansk, Zaporizhia and Avdiivka." — AFP
The regional governor says debris from a drone destroyed over the Russian region of Belgorod, which borders Ukraine, fell on homes and killed three people, including a young child.
The air defense system "shot down an aircraft-type UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) approaching the city", says Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov, adding that the falling debris destroyed several homes.
"Most importantly, three people were killed, one of them a small child," he writes on the Telegram messaging app, accompanied by pictures of a house reduced to a pile of rubble behind red and white police tape. — AFP
Ukraine's air force says on Tuesday that it had destroyed 27 of 36 Russian attack drones overnight in the south of the country.
Ukrainian forces downed 27 "Shahed-136/131" drones in the southern Kherson, Mykolaiv and Odesa regions, the air force said on the messaging platform Telegram.
In all, Moscow had launched 36 of the Iranian-made drones from the Crimean peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014, it says. — AFP
The Kremlin claims on Friday Russian forces never targeted civilian infrastructure after Ukraine blamed Moscow for a missile attack that killed over 50 people in the eastern village of Groza.
"We repeat that the Russian military does not strike civilian targets. Strikes are carried out on military targets, on places where military personnel are concentrated," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says in his daily briefing. — AFP
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