Kyiv, Ukraine (AP) – Russia stepped up its offensive in eastern Ukraine on Sunday as the Polish president traveled to Kyiv to support the country’s European Union aspirations and became the first foreign leader to address Ukraine’s parliament since the start of the war.
MEPs thanked President Andrzej Duda with a standing ovation for the honor of speaking where “the heart of a free, independent and democratic Ukraine beats”. Duda received more applause when he said Ukraine did not have to submit to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s terms in order to end the conflict.
“Unfortunately, there have also been worrying voices in Europe recently demanding that Ukraine give in to Putin’s demands,” he said. “I want to say clearly: only Ukraine has the right to decide on its future. Only Ukraine has the right to decide for itself.”
Duda’s visit, his second to Kyiv since April, came as Russian and Ukrainian forces fought along a 551-kilometer wedge of the country’s eastern industrial heartland.
After Russia declared full control of a sprawling seafront steel mill that was the last defensive outpost in the port city of Mariupol, Russia launched artillery and missile attacks in the region known as Donbass to expand territory supported by Moscow Separatists has held since 2014.
To bolster its defenses, Ukraine’s parliament on Sunday voted to extend martial law and mobilization of the armed forces for a third time until August 23.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has stressed that the 27-member EU should speed up his country’s bid to join the bloc. Ukraine’s possible candidacy is to be discussed at a Brussels summit at the end of June.
France’s Europe Minister Clement Beaune told Radio J on Sunday it will be “a long time” before Ukraine becomes an EU member, estimating it could take up to two decades.
“We have to be honest,” he said. “If you say that Ukraine will join the EU in six months or a year or two, you are lying.”
But Poland is stepping up efforts to win over other EU members who are reluctant to include Ukraine in the bloc. Zelenskyi said Duda’s visit marked a “historic union” between Ukraine, which declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, and Poland, which ended communist rule two years earlier.
“This is truly a historic opportunity not to lose such strong blood-built relationships to Russian aggression,” Zelenskyy said. “All this not to lose our state, not to lose our people.”
Poland has taken in millions of Ukrainian refugees and has become a gateway for Western humanitarian aid and arms into Ukraine. It is also a transit point for some foreign fighters who volunteered to fight Russian forces.
“Despite the great destruction, despite the terrible crime and great suffering suffered by the Ukrainian people every day, the Russian invaders did not break them. They failed at that. And I deeply believe that they will never succeed,” Duda told the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s legislature.
Duda credited the US and President Joe Biden with uniting the West in supporting Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Moscow.
“Kyiv is the place where you can clearly see that we need more America in Europe, both in the military dimension and in this economic dimension,” said Duda, a right-wing populist leader who clearly opposed former President Donald Trump in 2020 Biden preferred choice.
On the battlefield, Russia appeared to have made slow, tedious progress in Donbass in recent days. She stepped up efforts to seize Sievierodonetsk, the Ukrainian-controlled capital in Luhansk Province, which together with Donetsk Province forms the Donbass. Ukrainian military said on Sunday that Russian forces carried out an unsuccessful attack on Oleksandrivka, a village outside of Sievierodonetsk.
Sievierodonetsk was under heavy shelling, and Luhansk Governor Serhii Haidai said the Russians were “simply deliberately trying to destroy the city… and pursuing a scorched earth approach.”
Haidai said Moscow is concentrating forces and weapons there to try to gain control of Luhansk, bringing in forces from Kharkiv in the northwest, Mariupol in the south and from inside Russia.
The city’s only functioning hospital only has three doctors and supplies for 10 days, he said.
In a morning General Staff report, Russia also said it was preparing to resume its offensive on Sloviansk, a city in Donetsk province that saw fierce fighting last month after Moscow’s forces withdrew from Kyiv.
In Enerhodar, a Russian-held town 281 kilometers (174 miles) northwest of Mariupol, the Moscow-appointed mayor was injured in an explosion at his residence on Sunday, Ukrainian and Russian news agencies reported. Ukraine’s Unian news agency said a bomb planted by “local partisans” injured Andrei Shevchuk, 48, who died near the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest.
As Russia claimed to have captured nearly 2,500 Ukrainian militants from the Mariupol steel mill, concern grew for their fate and that of the remaining residents of the city, which now lies in ruins with more than 20,000 dead.
Relatives of the fighters have called for them to be granted prisoner-of-war rights and eventually returned to Ukraine. Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said Ukraine will fight “for the return” of each of them.
The complete seizure of the Azovstal steel mill, a symbol of Ukrainian tenacity, brought Putin a much-needed victory in the war he started nearly three months ago, on February 24.
Denis Pushilin, the pro-Kremlin boss of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, promised that the plant’s Ukrainian militants would be brought to justice. He said foreigners were among them, although he gave no details.
The Ukrainian government has not commented on Russia’s claim to capture Azovstal. The Ukrainian military had told the fighters that their mission was complete and they could come out. It described their extraction as an evacuation, not a mass surrender.
Mariupol Mayor Vadim Boychenko warned that the city faces a health and sanitation disaster due to mass burials in shallow pits as well as the collapse of sewage systems. An estimated 100,000 of the 450,000 people who lived in Mariupol before the war remained.
Ukrainian authorities have claimed Russian atrocities there, including the bombings of a maternity hospital and a theater where hundreds of civilians had taken cover.
Meanwhile, a Ukrainian court was due on Monday to deliver a verdict on a Russian soldier who was the first to be tried for an alleged war crime. The 21-year-old sergeant, who admitted shooting a Ukrainian man in the head in a village in the north-eastern Sumy region on February 28, could face life in prison if convicted.
Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said her office is prosecuting war crimes cases against 41 Russian soldiers for crimes including bombing civilian infrastructure, killing civilians, rape and looting. It said it was investigating more than 10,700 potential war crimes involving over 600 suspects, including Russian soldiers and government officials.
In other developments, Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Zelenska, along with her husband, gave a rare interview to national broadcaster ICTV and said she had hardly seen him since the war began.
“Our family is now separated, like all Ukrainian families,” she said, adding that she mainly speaks to him over the phone.
“Unfortunately, we can’t sit together, have dinner with the whole family, talk about everything,” she said.
Zelenskyy himself called the interview “a date on air,” and the couple, who have two children, joked to journalists.
“We joke, but we are really, like everyone else, waiting to be reunited, like all families in Ukraine who are now separated, waiting for their relatives and friends who want to be together again,” he said.
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Becatoros reported from Donetsk. Associated Press journalists Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Andrea Rosa in Kharkiv, and other AP staffers around the world contributed.
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