Ukraine’s president accuses Russia of waging ‘total war’

Russian forces have achieved ‘some localised successes’ despite strong Ukrainian resistance along dug-in positions: UK

KYIV: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of waging “total war,” seeking to inflict as much death and destruction as possible as in three months of conflict, as fighting raged on Tuesday in the eastern Donbas region.

Russian forces have intensified efforts to encircle and capture Sievierodonetsk and neighboring cities, the only part of the Donbas’ Luhansk region that remains under Ukrainian government control, British military authorities said.

That battle is only one part of the Russian campaign to take the Donbas, which is now the Kremlin’s focus after its forces failed to overrun Kyiv in the early weeks of the war and were forced to withdraw and pursue more a limited objective. But its troops have become bogged down again in the eastern industrial heartland of coal mines and factories.

Russian forces have achieved “some localised successes” despite strong Ukrainian resistance along dug-in positions, the UK defense ministry said, but the fall of Sievierodonetsk and the area around it may cause logistical problems for the Russians. “If the Donbas front line moves further west, this will extend Russian lines of communication and likely see its forces face further logistic resupply

difficulties,” the ministry said.

On the eve of the threemonth anniversary of the start of the war, Zelensky told Ukrainians that Russia is waging “total war, when the enemy tries to destroy as many people and infrastructure as possible.”

Workers find 200 bodies at Mariupol building site

Workers digging through rubble found 200 bodies in Mariupol, Ukrainian authorities said Tuesday, another grim discovery in the ruined port city that has seen some of the worst suffering of the 3-month-old war.

The bodies found in the basement of a collapsed apartment building were in a state of

decomposition and a stench permeated the neighbourhood, said Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to the city’s mayor.

China and Russia hold military exercise

China and Russia’s air forces conducted a joint aerial patrol on Tuesday over the Sea of Japan, East China Sea and the Western Pacific, China’s defence ministry said. The patrol, the first since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, was part of an annual military exercise, the ministry said on its official website.

The two countries had previously held such patrols in 2019, 2020 and 2021 but in the latter half of the year.

AFP Olga Khomenko, 67, looks for remains of her son, a 38-year-old local man who allegedly died when his car was hit by a shell of Russian tank outside the village of Mala Rogan near Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine, on Monday.