West’s weapons help Ukraine go on offense
Troops move to drive back Russian soldiers in town-for-town battle
Ukrainian troops, emboldened by sophisticated weapons and long-range artillery supplied by the West, went on the offensive Friday against Russian forces in the northeast, seeking to drive them back from two key cities as the war plunged more deeply into a grinding, town-fortown battle.
After weeks of intense fighting along a 300-mile-long front, neither side has been able to achieve a major breakthrough, with one army taking a few
villages one day, only to lose just as many in the following days. In its latest effort to reclaim territory, the Ukrainian military said that fierce battles were being waged as it fought to retake Russiacontrolled areas around Kharkiv in the northeast and Izyum in the east.
The stepped-up combat came as the White House announced Friday that President Joe Biden would meet virtually Sunday with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine and the leaders of the Group of Seven major industrial nations: Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the leaders would convene as President Vladimir Putin of Russia prepares to celebrate the annual holiday of Victory Day on Monday with military parades and speeches commemorating the Soviet Union’s triumph over Nazi Germany.
The holiday has intensified fears in Ukraine and some Western capitals that Putin could exploit the occasion to expand his Feb. 24 invasion, after his initial drive failed to rout the Ukrainian military and topple the government.
“While he expected to be marching through the streets of Kyiv, that’s actually not what is going to happen,” Psaki said. She called the G-7 meeting “an opportunity to not only show how unified the West is in confronting the aggression and the invasion by President Putin, but also to show that unity requires work.”
Ukraine on Friday urged civilians to brace for heavier assaults before Victory Day in Russia, warning them to avoid large gatherings and putting in place new curfews from Ivano-frankivsk in the west to Zaporizhzhia in the southeast.
Ukrainian police forces were also placed on heightened alert before the holiday, which will be commemorated in Russia with military parades in Moscow and hundreds of other cities.
Vadym Denysenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, warned civilians that they could risk their lives by gathering in crowded places.
“We all remember what happened at the train station in Kramatorsk,” Denysenko said on Telegram, referring to a devastating missile strike in that eastern city last month. Dozens of people were killed as they crowded on railway platforms, trying to flee the invasion.
“Be vigilant,” Denysenko said. “This is the most important thing.”
The regional governor of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, Serhiy Haidai, warned Russian forces were preparing for a major offensive in the next few days against the eastern cities of Severodonetsk and Popsana. He assailed what he called continued horror in the region, saying the latest Russian shelling had killed two people and destroyed dozens of houses.
The pace of Russian missile strikes across Ukraine has been intensifying in recent days as Moscow tries to slow the flow of Western arms across the country. But as with so many aspects of the war, uncertainty about Putin’s intentions runs deep.
There is rampant speculation that he might use the upcoming holiday to convert what he calls a “special military operation” into an all-out war, which would create a justification for a mass mobilization of Russian troops and set the stage for a more broad-ranging conflict. Kremlin officials have denied any such plans. But they also had denied plans to invade Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials have said that a military draft in Russia could provoke a backlash among its citizens, many of whom, polls show, still view the war as a largely distant conflict filtered through the convoluted and sometimes conflicting narratives provided by state-controlled media.
“General mobilization in Russia is beneficial to us,” Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, said. “It can lead to a revolution.”
Some Western analysts speculate that Putin may instead point to the territory that Moscow has already seized in eastern Ukraine to bolster his false claims that Russia is liberating the region from Nazis.
The Pentagon, for its part, has avoided stoking speculation about Putin’s Victory Day plans.
“What they plan to do or say on Victory Day, that’s really up to them,” Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said Thursday. “I don’t think we have a perfect sense.”
Fears that Russia could intensify its assault came as the U.N. Security Council adopted a statement Friday supporting efforts by U.N. Secretary- General António Guterres to broker a diplomatic resolution to the war.
The statement, initiated by Mexico and Norway, was the first action regarding Ukraine that the council had unanimously approved since the invasion began. Russia supported the statement, which did not call the conflict a “war,” a term the Kremlin forbids.
Zelenskyy insisted Friday that peace talks cannot resume until Russian forces pull back. Still, he did not foreclose the possibility of a negotiated settlement.
“Not all the bridges are destroyed,” he said, speaking remotely at a virtual event held by Chatham House, a British research organization.
Alexey Zaitsev, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson, said Friday that talks between Russia and Ukraine were “in a state of stagnation,” Russian state media reported.
Zaitsev blamed NATO countries for prolonging the war by shipping billions of dollars in arms to Ukraine, even as those countries have urged Putin to withdraw his troops.
Zelenskyy said that Russian propagandists had spent years fueling hatred that had driven Russian soldiers to hunt civilians, destroy cities and commit the kind of atrocities seen in the besieged southern port of Mariupol. Much of the city, once home to more than 400,000 people, has been leveled. It has become a potent symbol of the devastation wrought by Russia in Ukraine.
Zelenskyy said Russia’s determination to destroy the last Ukrainian fighters holed up with desperate civilians in bunkers beneath the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol only underscored the cruelty that has defined the invasion.
“This is terrorism and hatred,” he said.
On Friday, 50 women, children and elderly people who had been trapped beneath the Azovstal plant in Mariupol were evacuated in a humanitarian convoy, according to a highranking Ukrainian official and Russian state media.
Nearly 500 people have managed to leave the Azovstal plant, Mariupol and surrounding areas in recent days with help from the United Nations and the Red Cross.
As the fighting drags on, concerns are growing that the war could exacerbate a global hunger crisis.
The United Nations said Friday that there was mounting evidence that Russian troops looted tons of Ukrainian grain and destroyed grain storage facilities, adding to a disruption in exports that has already caused a surge in global prices, with devastating consequences for poor countries.