Addressing his armed forces on Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said they were fighting for their country at the Russian firepower parade in Moscow as his troops stepped up their 10-week offensive against Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials said intense fighting was continuing in eastern Ukraine, and Moscow’s commitment to the Soviet Union’s World War II.
The Ukrainian military later said, without providing details, that four high-precision Onyx missiles fired from the Russian-controlled Crimean peninsula hit the Odessa region in southern Ukraine.
Putin said Russia’s “special military operation” was a purely defensive and inevitable measure against Russia’s plans to invade territory, historically including Crimea, supported by the Western military alliance North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
“Russia repelled the aggressor beforehand,” he said, without providing any evidence that Crimea and Ukraine were calling clear preparations to attack the Donbas region.
In 2014, Russian-backed separatists captured parts of Donbas in eastern Ukraine, and in the same year Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine. Moscow then concentrated its troops around Ukraine last year before an all-out invasion, which Ukraine and its Western allies say was completely unprovoked.
After Putin’s statements, Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said, “NATO countries do not attack Russia. Ukraine did not plan to attack Crimea.”
Putin did not mention Ukraine by name in his speech and gave no indication of how long the war could last.
Also, no reference was made to the bloody battle of Mariupol, where one of the Ukrainian defenders hiding in the ruins of the Azovstal steelworks asked the international community to assist in the evacuation of wounded soldiers.
“We will continue to fight as long as we are alive to repel the Russian invaders,” said Captain Sviatoslav Palamar.
Russian forces have devastated villages, towns and cities and forced nearly six million Ukrainians to flee since they invaded Ukraine on February 24.
Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar said Russian forces were currently trying to advance in eastern Ukraine, where the situation was “difficult”, but had withdrawn from the city of Kharkov, where a local official reported heavy Russian shelling.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy confirmed that dozens of people were killed in a bomb attack by Russia on a school in eastern Ukraine on Saturday.
“As a result of the Russian attack on Bilohorivka in the Luhansk region, about 60 civilians who hid in the school and took shelter from the shelling were killed,” Zelenskiy said in his evening video speech.
source: Noticias
