Zelenskyy puts spotlight on family ties amid war
One photograph shows a kneeling soldier kissing a child inside a subway station, where Ukraine families shelter from Russian airstrikes. In another, an infant and a woman who appears on the brink of tears look out from a departing train car as a man peers inside, his hand spread across the window in a gesture of goodbye.
In an uplifting Father’s Day message on Sunday, local time, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy posted 10 photos of parents and children set against the grim backdrop of war, praising fathers who ‘‘protect and defend the most precious.’’
There are scenes of childbirth, as a man and woman look towards a swaddled baby in what appears to be a hospital room where the spackled walls show scars of fighting. In another, a man lifts a child over a fence towards a woman with outstretched arms on a train platform.
‘‘Being a father is a great responsibility and a great happiness,’’ Zelenskyy wrote in English text that followed the Ukrainian on Instagram.
‘‘It is strength, wisdom, motivation to go forward and not to give up.’’
He urged his nation’s fighters to endure for the ‘‘future of your family, your children, and therefore the whole of Ukraine’’.
His message came as four months of war in Ukraine appear to be straining the morale of troops on both sides, prompting desertions and rebellion against officers’ orders. Nato’s chief warned the fighting could drag on for ‘‘years.’’
‘‘Combat units from both sides are committed to intense combat in the Donbas and are likely experiencing variable morale,’’ Britain’s defence ministry said in its daily assessment of the war.
‘‘Ukrainian forces have likely suffered desertions in recent weeks,’’ the assessment said, but added that ‘‘Russian morale highly likely remains especially troubled’’.
It said ‘‘cases of whole Russian units refusing orders and armed stand-offs between officers and their troops continue to occur’’.
In an interview published in the German weekly Bild am Sonntag, Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that ‘‘nobody knows’’ how long the war could last.
‘‘We need to be prepared for it to last for years,’’ he said.
Stoltenberg also urged allies ‘‘not to weaken support for Ukraine, even if the costs are high, not only in terms of military aid, but also because of the increase in energy and food goods prices’’.
Britain’s defence ministry said that both Russia and Ukraine have continued to conduct heavy artillery bombardments to the north, east and south of the Sieverodonetsk pocket, but with little change in the front line.
Luhansk governor Serhiy Haidai said via Telegram on Sunday: ‘‘It is a very difficult situation in Sievierodonetsk, where the enemy in the middle of the city is conducting round-theclock aerial reconnaissance with drones, adjusting fire, quickly adjusting to our changes.’’ –