On the eve of the 100th day of the start of the war, the Russian army controls “about 20%” of Ukrainian territory, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on Thursday in a speech in front of the Luxembourg Parliament.
The area occupied is almost 125,000 square kilometers he said, a territory larger than the combined territories of the Beneluxconsisting of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.
At the end of the war in 2014, which resulted in the loss of Crimea and part of the territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, Ukraine was cut by 43,000 square km, he said.
Currently, the front line, which extends from Kharkiv to Mykolaiv, passing through the regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson, extends to more than 1000 kilometerssaid Mr. Zelensky.
According to him, Russian troops have placed mines in territories with a total of 300,000 square kilometers and managed to penetrate 3620 towns and villages in the country, 1017 of which were liberated by the Ukrainian army.
The Ukrainian president claimed that 30,000 Russian soldiers had been killed since the invasion began, an unverifiable number, but higher than that provided by Western intelligence services.
Mr. Zelensky estimated thatat least tens of thousands Ukrainian civilians were killed in the Russian offensive, but remained silent on the losses suffered by his army.
In an interview given Wednesday on the American network Newsmax, the Ukrainian president advanced that between 60 and 100 Ukrainian fighters are killed every day and that approximately 500 others are injured.
More details to come.
Source: Radio-Canada
