UKRAINIANS STAND TALL
Embattled prez calls invasion ‘nightmare’ for Russian forces and praises resistance
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine celebrated stiff resistance his 30-year-old country has staged against the Russian invasion, declaring late Monday that the invaders had entered a “nightmare” and promising his country would turn back his neighbor’s powerful military.
“We are all at war. We all contribute to our victory, which will definitely be achieved. By force of arms and our army. By force of words and our diplomacy. By force of spirit,” Zelenskyy said in a nine-minute nighttime speech, according to a translation published by his office.
“We must realize that every day of struggle, every day of resistance creates better conditions for us,” Zelenskyy added.
But a Ukrainian victory — which Western analysts viewed as the longest of long shots — remained beyond Zelenskyy’s grasp, and the Russian military’s noose around his country’s south appeared to be tightening.
The U.S., meanwhile, deployed 500 more troops to Europe, as an official count of Ukrainian refugees who have poured out of their homeland hit 1.7 million.
A valiant defense had blunted Russia’s northern ground advance on the country’s two largest cities, Kyiv and Kharkiv, but the frustrated Russian Army appeared to be ramping up its air attacks on Ukraine’s population center.
Ukraine and Russia have tilted into a battle for the skies. On Monday night, the Ukrainian military said it had shot down two Russian aircraft over Kyiv, the capital, which along with Kharkiv, has been devastated by missile strikes during the 12-day-old war.
One of Ukraine’s deputy prime ministers, Mykhailo Fedorov, published a video on social media that showed the aftermath of one missile strike in Kharkiv.
Black smoke gushed out of a large dark gouge in the structure that ran about a dozen floors. TV news reports showed streets littered with building debris in Kharkiv, home to more than 1 million at peacetime.
John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said the U.S. assessed the Russians “haven’t made any noteworthy progress in the last few days with the exception of down south,” where they have captured Europe’s largest nuclear plant and the city of Kherson.
“As they continue to get frustrated, they continue to rely now more on what we would call longrange fires,” Kirby told reporters Monday. “This is bombardment, missile strikes, long-range artillery into city centers.”
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskyy, reported Monday that the brutal Russian assault had damaged 202 schools, 34 health care centers and at least 1,500 residential buildings.
The World Health Organization put its tally of attacked Ukrainian health care facilities at 14, with nine people dead in the assaults, but noted that it believed its ledger was an undercount.
“The Russian Army doesn’t know how to fight against other armies,” Podolyak wrote on Twitter. “But it’s good at killing civilians.”
Still, the United Nations said Monday that 1.7 million refugees had made it out of Ukraine while Europe is facing a refugee crisis ballooning faster than any other since World War II.
With the invasion apparently lagging well behind the Kremlin’s schedule, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators met yet again for diplomatic talks.
And for a third time, they seemed to come up empty, with even basic agreements around humanitarian corridors fragile. President Emmanuel Macron of
France said Monday that he did not expect a negotiated solution was around the corner.
Also Monday, President Biden met with Macron, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
The world leaders, who have worked together as the West whips Russia with crippling economic sanctions, affirmed “their determination to continue raising the costs on Russia,” the White House said in a statement. The statement added that the leaders “underscored their commitment” to aiding Ukraine.
The U.S. Defense Department said it was deploying more U.S. troops to Europe to shore up NATO’s defenses. In all, the Pentagon has ordered about 12,000 service members from various U.S. bases to Europe, with a couple of thousand more already stationed abroad shifting to other European countries.
Biden has ruled out sending
any American troops directly into Ukraine, wary of sparking a third World War, but the U.S. offered humanitarian aid and military weaponry instead.
The deployment to Europe represented another signal of U.S. support for NATO, a 30-member military alliance that borders Ukraine and has drawn Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ire.
The Russian president has long wished to prevent Ukraine from joining the bloc, though his decision to invade a peaceful neighbor last month stunned the globe.
As Putin’s own country’s economy buckles, he has deployed almost the entire 150,000-strong army of troops he massed around Ukraine this winter, and riddled his neighbor with more than 600 missiles, according to U.S. estimates.
In 2014, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, a Black Sea peninsula on Ukraine’s southern coast. That seizure has aided
Russia in its attack over the past two weeks, as the invaders have charged through sections of southern Ukraine.
Kherson, which had a population of around 280,000 before the war, has fallen to Russian soldiers. Mariupol, a port in Ukraine’s southeast, has gone for days without water, electricity and heat as Russians bombard the city.
And the seizure of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant has raised the alarm from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The agency’s director general, Rafael Mariano Grossi, said Monday that Russian forces controlled the plant and made decisions about its operation.
“This is not a safe way to run a nuclear power plant,” Grossi said in a statement, describing the situation as “precarious.”
In Russian-controlled Kherson, residents said food was running low, and that bare grocery shop shelves lack basics like milk, cheese and butter. Cleaning supplies and booze have vanished, they said. “It’s a no-man’s-land,” said Gordey Diachenko, 27, a kettlebell maker and lifelong resident of Kherson.
After Russian troops seized the city last week, Diachenko said that they stopped any entry and exit out of the town. But locals have proved defiant, taking to the streets to protest the Russian occupation over the weekend.
A man waving a Ukrainian flag jumped atop a Russian armored vehicle as demonstrators cheered in one widely circulated video. After the protest, Russian troops have mostly stayed on the city’s edge, Diachenko said.
“I can’t say that they are scared — but for sure they do not feel safe,” Diachenko told the Daily News, describing the Russian troops. “They basically took the town by force. And now they are standing in it, not knowing what to do with it.”