Six months after the start of the war, Volodimir Zelensky promises that Ukraine “will fight to the end”

Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky said on Wednesday that Ukraine will resist the Russian invasion “to the end” without making “any concessions or compromises”, in a message for the country’s Independence Day, which coincides with the six months of war.

“We are not interested in the army they have, we are only interested in our land. We will fight for it to the end,” Zelenski said in a video released in the morning on the occasion of the commemoration of Independence.

Referring to Russia, which launched an offensive against his country on February 24, he promised that Ukraine “will not try to get along with the terrorists”.

“We need to be aware of that tomorrow disgusting Russian provocations and brutal bombings are possible“Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelenski warned in his traditional night message on Tuesday.

“Obviously we will respond to any manifestation of Russian terrorism,” he added.

“We stood still for six months. It’s difficult, but we clenched our fists and fought for our fate. For us Ukraine is all of Ukraine. All 25 regions, without concessions or compromises,” he said Wednesday.

In the first hours of the commemoration, cities such as Kharkiv (northeast) or Zaporizhia and Dnipro (center) were seen shaken by strong explosionslocal authorities indicated.

The US embassy in Kiev on Tuesday warned that Russia was preparing to step up its bombing “in the coming days” and asked its citizens to leave the country as soon as possible.

fighting to the east

Since the withdrawal of Russian forces from the area around Kiev at the end of March, the fighting is concentrated in eastern Ukrainewhere Moscow has slowly gained ground before stopping, and in the south, where Ukrainian troops claim to be conducting a slow counter-offensive.

However, Russia continues to regularly bomb Ukrainian cities with long-range missiles, although Kiev and its surroundings are rarely hit.

After six months of war that caused thousands of deaths, millions of displaced people and vast destruction, “celebration” is not the right word to define this Independence Day in Ukraine.

The Kiev authorities they banned any public congregation from Monday to Thursday in the capital and the governor of the Kharkov region ordered a curfew from Tuesday evening to Thursday morning.

“In six months, peaceful life was interrupted in all families,” says Nina Mikhailovna, an 80-year-old retiree in Independence Square, the so-called Maidan Square, in the heart of Kyiv.

“How much destruction, how many deaths, what is this?” he wondered.

United States military aid

Taking advantage of this symbolic date, the United States will announce this Wednesday a new military aid of 3,000 million dollars, the largest Kiev ever received, a US official said.

The new US package will help Kiev acquire weapons, ammunition and other supplies for its army.

On Tuesday, the countries of the European Union stressed their support for Kiev at a summit on the “Crimean platform”, which brings together Ukraine’s main allies and existed before the war.

French President Emmanuel Macron urged the international community not to show “any weakness” to Russia.

The head of the German government, Olaf Scholz, has assured that his country will support Ukraine “as long as necessary” and has promised to continue “delivering weapons. […] and training Ukrainian soldiers with state-of-the-art European equipment. “Germany will deliver new weapons to Kiev worth 500 million euros, most of which will arrive in 2023.

Along the same lines, the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, said in an interview with AFP that Russian President Vladimir Putin is betting on the “reluctance” of Europeans to bear the economic consequences of the war.

This is why he insisted that unity among the 27 countries of the bloc is a task that must be reaffirmed “day by day”.

nuclear power plant

Meanwhile, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who granted Russian troops access to invade Ukraine, congratulated the Ukrainian people on Independence Day on Wednesday and said he was “convinced that the current differences will not be in capable of destroying the multisectoral basis of sincere good neighborly relations “.

The conflict was again the subject of debate in the UN Security Council, where representatives of Moscow and Kiev again accused each other of the recent bombing of the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe.

Russian ambassador Vassily Nebenzia accused Ukrainian forces of continuing to bomb the plant “practically every day”, while his Ukrainian counterpart Sergiy Kyslytsya said they would never create “a huge risk of catastrophe on their territory”.

The UN has repeatedly called on both sides to abandon any military activity around the facility and to facilitate an inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency of the site.

The director of this UN agency, Rafael Grossi, said that this visit “seeks to reduce the risk of a serious nuclear accident in Europe” and could take place “in a few days if the ongoing negotiations are successful”.

Source: AFP

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