EU set to make historic offer to Kyiv
Zelenskyy hails move toward membership
KYIV/KHARKIV • Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday hailed the European Union’s expected offer of candidate status for his battle-weary nation as Russian forces pounded Ukraine’s second-biggest city Kharkiv and the eastern Donbas region.
European leaders will set Ukraine on the long road to EU membership at a summit in Brussels on Thursday. Though mainly symbolic, the move will help lift national morale at a difficult time in a four-month conflict that has killed thousands.
The war has also had a massive impact on the global economy and European security arrangements, driving up gas, oil and food prices, pushing the EU to reduce its heavy reliance on Russian energy and prompting Finland and Sweden to seek NATO membership.
The EU will temporarily shift back to coal to cope with dwindling Russian gas flows without derailing longer term climate goals, an EU official said on Wednesday.
“I do believe that all 27 European Union countries will support our candidate status,” Zelenskyy told students in Toronto via videolink.
“This is like going into the light from the darkness.”
Diplomats say it will take Ukraine a decade or more to meet the criteria for joining the EU. But EU leaders say Ukrainians are fighting for European values of democracy and that the bloc must make a gesture that recognizes their sacrifice.
For now, however, with its forces running low on ammunition as a fierce war of attrition grinds on in the Donbas, Ukraine has more urgent priorities.
The Russian strikes on Tuesday and Wednesday on Kharkiv, near the Russian border, were the worst in weeks in an area where normal life had been returning since Ukraine pushed Moscow’s forces back last month.
Kyiv characterized the strikes, which killed at least 20 people, as a bid to force Ukraine to pull resources from the main battlefields in the Donbas to protect civilians.
“It was shelling by Russian troops. It was probably multiple rocket launchers. And it’s the missile impact,” Kharkiv prosecutor Mikhailo Martosh told Reuters amid the ruins of cottages struck on Tuesday in a rural area on the city’s outskirts.
Medical workers carried the body of an elderly woman from a burnt-out garage to a nearby van.
“She was 85 years old. A child of the war (Second World War). She survived one war, but didn’t make it through this one,” said her grandson Mykyta.
Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said in a video address that Russian forces were hitting Kharkiv “with the aim of terrorizing the population.”
“The idea is to create one big problem to distract us and force us to divert troops. I think there will be an escalation,” Arestovych said.
Zelenskyy has also warned the fighting may escalate ahead of the EU summit. Russia has long opposed closer links between Ukraine and Western clubs such as the EU and especially NATO.
Moscow says Ukrainian forces in Sievierodonetsk, scene of the heaviest recent fighting, are trapped. It ordered them last week to surrender or die after the last bridge over the Siverskyi Donets river was destroyed.
But Oleksandr Ratushniak, a freelance photographer who reached Sievierodonetsk with Ukrainian forces in recent days, filmed reinforcements crossing in an inflatable raft.
Inside Russia, a fire tore through an oil refinery just 8 kilometres from the frontier with Donbas territory controlled by pro-russian separatists, after what the refinery described as a cross-border attack on Wednesday by two drones.
There was no immediate Ukrainian comment on the strike, which suspended production at the Novoshakhtinsk refinery.