Zaporizhzhia( Ukraine)- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Kyiv’s military has made small gains in the east, pushing Russian forces out of four villages near Kharkiv, as the foreign minister of his country suggested Ukraine could go further than simply forcing Russia back to areas it held before the invasion began 11 weeks ago.
In the midst of Russia’s stalled offensive in the east, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba expressed what appeared to be growing confidence — and expanded goals, telling the Financial Times that Ukraine initially believed victory would be the withdrawal of Russian troops to positions they occupied before the Feb. 24 invasion. However, this is no longer the case.
“Now if we are strong enough on the military front, and we win the battle for Donbas, which will be crucial for the following dynamics of the war, of course the victory for us in this war will be the liberation of the rest of our territories,” Kuleba said.
Russian soldiers have advanced in the Donbas and now control more of the region than they did before the war started. However, Kuleba’s statement — which seemed to reflect political objectives rather than tactical reality — highlighted how Ukraine has stymied a larger, better-equipped Russian force, surprise many who had expected the conflict to be over much sooner.
One of the most dramatic examples of Ukraine’s ability to prevent easy victories is in Mariupol, where Ukrainian fighters holed up at a steel plant have denied Russia full control of the city. The regiment defending the plant said Russian warplanes continued bombarding it, striking 34 times in 24 hours.
The United Nations and the Red Cross recently coordinated a rescue of the plant’s final civilians, according to some officials. However, two authorities stated Tuesday that roughly 100 people were still believed to be trapped underground in the complex’s tunnels. People “that the Russians have not selected” for evacuation, according to Donetsk regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko.
Since President Vladimir Putin’s forces failed to take Kyiv early in the war, his focus has shifted to the eastern industrial heartland of the Donbas.
That would also give Russia a swath of territory linking it to both the Crimean Peninsula, which it seized in 2014, and Transnistria, a pro-Moscow region of Moldova.
Even if Russia falls short of severing Ukraine from the coast — and it appears to lack the forces to do so — continuing missile strikes on Odesa reflect the city’s strategic importance. The Russian military has repeatedly targeted its airport and claimed it destroyed several batches of Western weapons.
Odesa is also a major gateway for grain shipments, and its blockade by Russia already threatens global food supplies. Beyond that, the city is a cultural jewel, dear to Ukrainians and Russians alike, and targeting it carries symbolic significance.
With Russian forces struggling to gain ground in the Donbas, military analysts suggest that hitting Odesa might serve to stoke concern about southwestern Ukraine, thus forcing Kyiv to put more forces there. That would pull Ukrainian units away from the eastern front as Ukraine’s military stages counteroffensives near the northeastern city of Kharkiv in an attempt to push the Russians back across the border there.
Meanwhile, Kharkiv and the surrounding area have been under sustained Russian attack since the early in the war. In recent weeks, grisly pictures testified to the horrors of those battles, with charred and mangled bodies strewn in one street.
The bodies of 44 civilians were found in the rubble of a five-story building that collapsed in March in Izyum, about 120 kilometers (75 miles) from Kharkiv, said Oleh Synehubov, the head of the regional administration, said Tuesday.
Russian aircraft twice launched unguided missiles Tuesday at the Sumy area northeast of Kharkiv, according to the Ukrainian border guard service. The region’s governor said the missiles hit several residential buildings, but no one was killed. The Chernihiv region, along the Ukrainian border with Belarus, was hit by mortars fired from Russian territory. There was no word on casualties there.
Zelenskyy said Tuesday that the military was gradually pushing Russian troops away from Kharkiv. The Ukrainian military’s general staff said its forces drove the Russians out of four villages to the northeast of Kharkiv as it tries to push them back toward the Russian border.
Zelenskyy also used his nightly address to pay tribute to Leonid Kravchuk, the first president of an independent Ukraine, who died Tuesday at 88. Zelenskyy said Kravchuk showed courage and knew how to get the country to listen to him.
That was particularly important in “crisis moments, when the future of the whole country may depend on the courage of one man,” said Zelenskyy, whose own communication skills and decision to remain in Kyiv when it came under Russian attack helped make him a strong wartime leader.
