UKRAINIANS REPORT FIERCE RUSSIAN OFFENSIVES AS MOSCOW MARKS WWII VICTORY

ZAPORIZHZHIA, UKRAINE— Russian President Vladimir Putin told his armed forces on Monday they were fighting for their country at a parade of Russian firepower in Moscow, while his troops stepped up their 10-week-old assault on Ukraine.

Ukrainian officials said heavy fighting was underway in eastern Ukraine and warned people to take cover from expected missile strikes as Moscow marked the 77th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II.

Four high-precision Onyx missiles fired from the Russian-controlled Crimea peninsula struck the Odesa area in southern Ukraine, the Ukrainian military said later, without giving details.

Putin said Russia’s “special military operation” was a purely defensive and unavoidable measure against plans for a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) backed invasion of lands he said were historically Russia’s, including Crimea.

‘Aggressor rebuffed’

“Russia preventively rebuffed the aggressor,” he said, offering no evidence for what he called open preparations to attack Crimea and Ukraine’s the Donbas region.

In 2014, Russian-backed separatists seized parts of the Donbas in eastern Ukraine and Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine the same year. Moscow then massed troops around Ukraine last year ahead of an all-out invasion that Ukraine and its Western allies say was entirely unprovoked.

“Nato countries were not going to attack Russia. Ukraine did not plan to attack Crimea,” Ukrainian senior presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said after Putin’s comments.

Putin did not mention Ukraine by name in his speech and offered no indication of how long the war might continue.

There was also no reference to the bloody battle for Mariupol, where one of the Ukrainian defenders holed up in the ruins of the Azovstal steel works pleaded with the international community to help evacuate wounded soldiers.

“We will continue to fight as long as we are alive to repel the Russian occupiers,” Captain Sviatoslav Palamar said.

Russian forces have devastated villages, towns and cities and driven nearly six million Ukrainians to flee since they invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24.

Ukraine’s Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar said Russian forces were now trying to advance in eastern Ukraine, where the situation was “difficult,” but had moved back from the city of Kharkiv, where a local official reported heavy Russian shelling.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed the deaths of dozens of people in the Russian bombing of a school in eastern Ukraine on Saturday.

School bombing

“As a result of a Russian strike on Bilohorivka in the Luhansk region, about 60 people were killed, civilians, who simply hid at the school, sheltering from shelling,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address.

About 90 people had taken refuge at the school, the governor of Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region Serhiy Gaidai had said. There was no response from Moscow, which says it does not target civilians.

Gaidai said three more civilians had been killed in Kharkiv and three in the Luhansk region, where he said Russian forces were trying to cut off a route to safety known as the Road of Life.

“Today we do not know what to expect from the enemy, what terrible thing they might do, so please go out onto the street as little as possible, stay in the shelters,” Gaidai said on Monday.

Zelenskyy said his country would win against Russia and would not cede any territory.