Kiev, Ukraine (AP) – Nearly three months after Russia was shocked by Ukraine’s invasion of the world, its military faces a stalemate in war, a broader NATO outlook, and an adversary it will have to face Sunday. a victory and a victory on the battlefield.
NATO’s best diplomats met the head of the alliance in Berlin, who made the announcement The war “will not go as planned from Moscow”.
“Ukraine can win this war,” NATO Secretary -General Jens Stoltenberg said, adding that the Alliance should continue to provide military support to Kiev. He spoke in a video link at the meeting when he recovered from the COVID-19 infection.
In the diplomatic field, both Finland and Sweden have taken steps to approach NATO membership, despite Russian opposition. Finland announced on Sunday how it was trying to join NATO, saying it had the invasion changed Europe’s security landscape. Hours later, the ruling Swedish party supported the country’s membership, which could be announced within a few days.
If the two Scandinavian countries repeatedly join the alliance, it is an insult. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who sees NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe after the Cold War as a threat to Russia. NATO said it was a pure defensive alliance.
While Moscow has lost ground in the diplomatic field, Russian forces have also failed to achieve territorial victories in eastern Ukraine.
Ukraine says it has stopped Russia’s attacks in the east and Western military officials say the campaign was launched there from Moscow after its forces failed to seize the capital, Kiev, which slowed to Lokokin.
At the same time, Ukraine celebrated its success raising the morale of the Eurovision musical race. The folk-rap ensemble Kalush Orchestra won a brilliant pan-European competition with the song “Stefania”, which became the anthem of Ukrainians during the war.
President Volodymyr Zelensky promised that his country would honor the average winner after hosting the annual competition.
“We are gradually forcing the occupiers to leave Ukrainian territory,” Zelensky said.
The band’s frontman, Oleh Psyuk, told a press conference on Sunday that the musicians were “ready to fight” when they got home. The Ukrainian government banned men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country, but the six men in the group received special permission to travel to Italy to represent Ukraine in the competition.
They returned to a country that was still difficult to survive.
Russian and Ukrainian warriors were involved for the Donbas, the eastern industrial center of Ukraine. The most experienced and best Ukrainian soldiers have been fighting Moscow -backed separatists there for eight years.
Despite its failure, Russia continues to bring death and destruction to Ukraine. Over the weekend, his forces raided a chemical plant and 11 high -rise buildings in Donbass, Siverodonetsk, the region’s governor said. Governor Serhi Haidai said two people were killed in the attack and warned city residents to stay in underground shelters.
Russia’s missiles destroyed “military infrastructure structures” in western Ukraine, in the Yavoriv district, near the Polish border, the Lviv region governor said. Lviv was the main gateway to Western-supply weapons, acquired by Ukraine during the war.
The Ukrainian army said it had halted another Russian offensive in the Donbass district. Russian troops also tried to advance near the eastern city of Izium, but were stopped by Ukrainian forces, according to Olek Sinegubov, governor of the Ukrainian region of Kharkiv.
Ukraine blew up two railway bridges occupied by Russian forces in the eastern Lugansk region, the Ukrainian special operations command said on Sunday. He posted a video of the exploding bridges on Facebook. The command also claimed to have broken Russia’s communication lines in the region to prevent Russia from sending more troops to attack the cities of Lisichansk and Severodonetsk.
Ukrainian claims cannot be verified independently, but Western officials are also creating a bleak picture for Russia.
The British Defense Ministry said in its daily intelligence update that the Russian military had lost a third of the combat force deployed in Ukraine at the end of February and had not gained any significant territory.
“Under current circumstances, Russia is unlikely to accelerate its pace in the next 30 days,” the ministry wrote on Twitter.
Estimates of Russia’s war performance came after Russian troops withdrew to Kharkov, Ukraine’s second -largest city, which had been a major military target at the start of the war and bombed for weeks. The regional governor said the city had not been bombed for several days, although Russia continued to attack the Kharkov area.
A Ukrainian battalion fighting in the region reached the Russian border on Sunday and shot a winning video addressing Zelensky.
In a video posted on Facebook by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, dozens of fighters stood next to a yellow-blue pole in Ukrainian colors.
One explained that the unit had joined the division line with the Russian Federation, the occupying country. Mr. President, we have achieved this goal. We’re already here. “
The other warriors made signs of victory and raised their fists.
Despite the continuing threat of missile attacks, many people are returning home to Kharkov and other cities in Ukraine, Deputy Defense Minister Anna Maliar said on Sunday. The refugees returned not only in the hope that the war could be reduced.
“They live in such a place, they don’t work, they pay for housing, they eat, they are forced to return for financial reasons,” he said in a statement released by the RBK-Ukraine news agency.
In the southern Donbas, the port of Mariupol on the Azov Sea is largely under Russian control, except for a few hundred Ukrainian soldiers who refused to surrender and remained at the Azovstal steel mill.
Many of their spouses called on the global community to secure the release of the “entire garrison” at an online press conference. The women said the soldiers were severely short of food, water and medicine; Untreated injuries sometimes cause sepsis.
Ukraine’s Attorney General’s Office said regional prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation into Moscow’s alleged use of limited incendiary bombs in a steel mill. International law permits the use of incendiary ammunition but prohibits its use as a direct target by enemy personnel or civilians.
A spokesman for the Turkish president, Ibrahim Kalin, said the country had offered to evacuate Ukrainian soldiers and civilians wounded by Azovstal by ship, according to official state broadcaster TRT.
The invasion of Ukraine worries other countries on the Russian side that may follow, including Finland, which shares the same 1,340-kilometer land border and the Gulf of Finland with Russia. Putin told Finnish President Saul Niinisto over the phone on Saturday that joining NATO was a “mistake”.
In Sweden, after Social Democrats in power on Sunday endorsed NATO membership plans, the plan was debated in parliament on Monday, followed by a cabinet statement.
However, NATO is acting in accordance with the consensus and the potential proposals of the Scandinavian countries are in doubt due to Turkey’s concerns. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşo.lu said he discussed Turkey’s concerns at the NATO summit, particularly Sweden and Finland’s support for Kurdish rebel groups and their restrictions on arms sales to Turkey.
But during a visit to Sweden on Sunday, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell said Finland and Sweden would be “significant additions” to NATO and that the United States should quickly ratify their membership. McConnell led a delegation of GOP senators to the region. On Saturday they made a surprise visit to Kiev in support.
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McQuillan reported from Lviv. Yura Karmanau in Lviv, Mstislav Chernov and Andrea Rosa in Kharkov, Elena Bekatoros in Odessa and other AP staff from around the world contributed to this report.
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Follow the AP coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ucraina
Source: Huffpost
