Sunday’s commitment came as the United Kingdom said Russian forces were stepping up attacks on civilian infrastructure and a top United States general warned it was unclear how Moscow would respond to its battlefield failures in Ukraine. Zelensky said Ukrainian forces would continue to put pressure on Russia. “Perhaps now it seems to some of you that after a series of victories we now have a kind of calm,” he said in his video speech last night. “But this is not peace. This is the preparation for the next series… Why Ukraine must be free – all of that.” The Ukrainian military said its forces repelled attacks by Russian troops in areas of the Kharkiv region in the east and Kherson in the south where Ukraine launched counterattacks this month, as well as in areas of neighboring Donetsk. It said that Ukrainian troops had advanced to the eastern bank of the Oskil River in the Kharkiv region. “Since yesterday, Ukraine controls the east bank,” he said on Telegram. Serhiy Haidai, governor of neighboring Luhansk Oblast, said this meant the “dispossession” of his region was not “too far”. As Russian shells hit towns and cities over the weekend, Britain’s Ministry of Defense warned that Moscow is likely to increase attacks on civilian targets as it suffers defeats on the battlefield. “Over the past seven days, Russia has increased its targeting of civilian infrastructure, even where it likely perceives no immediate military effect,” the ministry said in an online briefing. “As it faces setbacks on the front lines, Russia has likely expanded the locations it is prepared to strike in an effort to directly undermine the morale of the Ukrainian people and government.” Meanwhile, US Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for vigilance after visiting a base in Poland that supports Ukraine’s war effort. His remarks were a reminder of the risks of escalation as the US and its NATO allies help Ukraine from afar. “The war is not going very well for Russia at the moment, so it is the duty of all of us to maintain high levels of readiness, vigilance,” he said after his trip to the base, which journalists traveling with him asked not to identify.
Warnings Putin and Biden
Russian President Vladimir Putin, however, rejected Ukraine’s swift counterattack and said Moscow would respond more forcefully if its troops came under further pressure. Such repeated threats have raised concerns that Putin could at some point turn to small nuclear weapons or chemical warfare. US President Joe Biden, asked what he would say to Putin if he were to consider using such weapons, replied in an interview on CBS’s ’60 Minutes’: ‘Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Don’t do it. It would change the face of warfare unlike anything since World War II.” Some military analysts said the Russians could also stage a nuclear attack at Zaporizhia, Europe’s largest nuclear plant owned by Russia but run by Ukrainian personnel. Moscow and Kyiv have blamed each other for shelling around the plant that has damaged buildings and disrupted power lines needed to keep it cool and safe. Police and experts work at a mass grave site discovered after Ukrainian forces pushed back Russians [Gleb Garanich/ Reuters] A top Vatican envoy reportedly came under fire in the city of Zaporizhzhia on Saturday as he helped distribute humanitarian supplies there. The incident forced Vatican Almoner Cardinal Konrad Krajewski and others to take cover, the Vatican news service reported Sunday. He reported no injuries. “For the first time in my life, I didn’t know where to run. Because it’s not enough to run, you have to know where to go,” said the Polish-born cardinal, whose office makes charitable contributions in the Pope’s name. Ukrainian officials, meanwhile, reported continued shelling across much of the country. Russian fire killed four doctors who tried to evacuate a psychiatric hospital in the Kharkiv region on Saturday, Governor Oleh Syniehubov said. Two patients were injured in the Strelekha attack, he said. The overnight shelling also hit a hospital in Mykolaiv, a major Black Sea port, regional governor Vitaliy Kim said. Five civilians were also killed in Russian attacks in the eastern Donetsk region last day, and in Nikopoli, further west, several dozen residential buildings, gas pipelines and power lines were hit, regional governors said. Separately, pro-Russian separatist forces that control much of Donetsk accused Ukraine of shelling a prisoner-of-war colony in Olenivka and said one prisoner was killed and four wounded in the attacks. Al Jazeera could not independently verify reports on the battlefield.
‘I’m still scared’
In the areas retaken by Russian forces, returning Ukrainians were searching for their dead relatives. In Izyum, where Ukrainian officials said they had found 440 bodies in a forest grave, Volodymyr Kolesnyk was trying to match numbers on wooden crosses with names on a carefully handwritten list to locate relatives he said were killed in an airstrike in early war. Kolesnyk told the Reuters news agency that he got the list from a local funeral company that dug up the graves. “They buried the bodies in bags, without coffins, without anything. At first I was not allowed here. They [Russians] said it was mined and asked to wait,” he said. Meanwhile, prosecutors in Kharkiv accuse Russia of torturing civilians in a recently liberated village. In an online statement, they said they had found a basement where Russian forces were allegedly torturing prisoners in Kozacha Lopan, near the border with Russia. In the released images, they showed a Russian military TA-57 phone with additional cables and alligator clips attached to it. Ukrainian officials have accused Russian forces of using Soviet-era walkie-talkies as a power source to shock detainees during interrogation. It was not immediately possible to verify the Ukrainian claims. Elsewhere in the region, residents of cities recaptured after six months of Russian occupation were returning with a mixture of joy and terror. “I still have this feeling that at any moment a shell might explode or a plane might fly,” said Nataliia Yelistratova, who traveled with her husband and daughter 80 kilometers (50 miles) by train from Kharkiv to her hometown. Balakliya to find her apartment building intact, but scarred by the shelling. “I’m still scared to be here,” he said after discovering a piece of shrapnel in a wall.
