As fighting rages, Ukraine’s leader says troops defy Russia

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said no one knows how long the war in his country will last but that Ukrainian forces are defying expectations by preventing Russian troops from overrunning eastern Ukraine, where the fighting has been fierce for weeks.

In his nightly video address, Zelensky said he was proud of the Ukrainian defenders managing to hold back the Russian advance in the eastern Donbas region, which borders Russia and where Moscow-backed separatists have controlled much of the territory for eight years.

“Remember how in Russia, in the beginning of May, they hoped to seize all of the Donbas?” the president said late Saturday. “It’s already the 108th day of the war, already June. Donbas is holding on.”

After failing to capture Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, early in the war, Moscow has focused on seizing the parts of the largely Russian-speaking Donbas still in Ukrainian hands, as well as the country’s southern coast. Russian forces have been drawn into a long, laborious battle, thanks in part to the Ukrainian military’s use of Western-supplied weapons.

Sievierodonetsk, an eastern city with a population of 100,000, is still being hotly fought over, both sides said. The city and neighbouring Lysychansk are the last major areas of the Donbas’ Luhansk province not under the control of the pro-Russia rebels.

Leonid Pasechnik, the head of the separatist-declared Luhansk People’s Republic, said Ukrainian fighters remained in an industrial area of the city, including a chemical plant where civilians had taken shelter during a weeks-long Russian bombardment.

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“Sievierodonetsk is not completely 100 per cent liberated,” Pasechnik said, claiming that Ukraine was shelling the city from the Azot plant. “So, it’s impossible to call the situation calm in Sievierodonetsk, that it is completely ours.”

Luhansk Gov. Serhii Haidai reported that a big fire broke out at the plant on Saturday during Russian shelling. Haidai said on Sunday on the Telegram messaging app that Russian forces were still shelling the chemical plant and destroyed a second bridge connecting Sieverodonetsk and Lysychansk.

He did not address how many soldiers or civilians were holed up in the plant.

A Luhansk People’s Republic’ official, Rodion Miroshnik, said that 300 to 400 Ukrainian troops remained blockaded inside the Sievierodonetsk chemical plant along with several hundred civilians. He said efforts are underway to try to evacuate the civilians but the troops will be allowed to leave only if they lay down their arms and surrender.

To the north of the city, Russian shelling of settlements in the Kharkiv region killed three people, Gov. Oleh Syniehubov said Sunday.

The Russian military said it destroyed a large weapons depot in western Ukraine, while local officials said missile strikes had injured civilians.

Russian Defence Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said long-range, sea-based Kalibr missiles had hit “a large depot of anti-tank missile systems, portable air defence systems and shells supplied to the Kyiv regime by the US and European countries” near the city of Chortkiv in the western Ukrainian region of Ternopil.

Ternopil governor Volodymyr Trush said missile strikes on Chortkiv injured 22 people, including seven women and a 12-year-old boy. Trush said four Russian missiles, launched Saturday evening, partially destroyed a military facility and damaged four residential buildings.

“If I were them, I would already make a decision (to surrender),” he said. “We will achieve our goal in any case.”