The Ukrainian president said Russia was trying to starve his country’s cities, but warned on Saturday that a continued invasion would hurt Russia for “generations.” The remarks came after Moscow held a mass rally in support of its weakened forces.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in a late-night video message, accused the Kremlin of deliberately creating a “humanitarian catastrophe” and again urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to meet with him to prevent more bloodshed.
Noting that the 200,000 people reported to have attended the rally are comparable to the number of Russian troops stationed in Ukraine, Zelenskiy said Friday’s event in Moscow showed the stakes of Europe’s biggest ground conflict since World War II.
“Imagine that there are 14,000 dead and tens of thousands more wounded and maimed in that stadium in Moscow,” the Ukrainian leader said, standing outside the president’s office in the capital, Kyiv. “Such are the costs of Russia during the invasion.”
Putin praised his country’s military during Friday’s flag-waving rally, which was held on the anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. The event featured patriotic songs such as “Made in the USSR”, with opening lines “Ukraine and Crimea, Belarus and Moldova, this is all my country.”
“We haven’t had such unity for a long time,” Putin told the cheering crowd.
Taking to the stage, where a sign read “For a world without Nazism,” he confronted his opponents in Ukraine, claiming unfoundedly that they were “neo-Nazis” and insisting that his actions were necessary to prevent “genocide.” rejected by leaders around the world.
The rally came as Russia suffered heavier-than-expected losses on the battlefield and increasingly authoritarian rule at home. Russian police detained thousands of anti-war demonstrators.
Fighting has raged on multiple fronts in Ukraine more than three weeks after Russia’s February 24 invasion.
The north-western suburbs of Kyiv Bucha, Khostomel, Irpen and Moshchun were shelled on Saturday, the Kyiv regional administration reported. The city of Slavutych, located 165 kilometers north of the capital, was “completely isolated,” the administration said.
In the besieged port city of Mariupol, one of the worst sufferings of the war, Ukrainian and Russian troops fought over the Azovstal steel plant, one of the largest in Europe, Vadym Denisenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, said Saturday.
“In fact, one of the largest metallurgical plants in Europe is being destroyed,” Denisenko said in a televised address.
On Saturday, the Russian military said it had used its latest hypersonic missile in combat for the first time. Representative of the Russian Defense Ministry, Major General Igor Konashenkov, said that Kinzhal missiles destroyed an underground warehouse of Ukrainian missiles and aviation ammunition in the west of the Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine.
Russia said the Kinzhal, flown by MiG-31 fighter jets, has a range of up to 2,000 kilometers (about 1,250 miles) and flies at 10 times the speed of sound.
A Ukrainian military spokesman confirmed that a military depot in the village of Delyatyn, Ivano-Frankivsk region, was hit on Friday, but on Saturday he told the Ukrayinska Pravda newspaper that authorities had not yet verified the type of missile used.
Konashenkov said Russian forces also used the Bastion anti-ship missile system to strike Ukrainian military installations near the Black Sea port of Odessa. Russia first used the weapon during its military campaign in Syria in 2016.
Ukrainian and Russian officials have agreed to set up 10 humanitarian corridors for the delivery of aid and the removal of residents – one from Mariupol and several around Kyiv and in the east of the Luhansk region, Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine Iryna Vereshchuk said on Saturday.
She also announced plans to deliver humanitarian aid to the southern city of Kherson, which has been captured by Russian forces.
In another report, Norway said four US servicemen were killed in a plane crash during a NATO exercise in the north of the country. The annual “Cold Response” exercise has nothing to do with the war in Ukraine.
In a late-night video message, Zelenskiy said Russian forces were blockading major cities in order to create such terrible conditions that Ukrainians would surrender. But he warned that Russia would pay the ultimate price.
“The time has come to restore territorial integrity and justice for Ukraine. Otherwise, the costs to Russia will be so high that you will not be able to rise again for several generations,” he said.
Since the invasion, the Kremlin has stepped up its crackdown on dissent and the flow of information, banning sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and issuing heavy prison sentences for what is considered false coverage of the war cited by Moscow. as a “special military operation”.
Volodymyr Medinsky, who led Russian negotiators in several rounds of talks with Ukraine, said on Friday that the two sides were closer to an agreement on Ukraine’s abandoning its NATO bid and adopting neutral status. In comments published by Russian media, he said that the parties are now “halfway” on the demilitarization of Ukraine.
However, Zelensky’s adviser Mykhailo Podoliak said that the characterization of Moscow was intended to “provoke tension in the media.” He tweeted: “Our position remains unchanged. Ceasefire, withdrawal of troops and reliable security guarantees with concrete formulas.”
The British Foreign Secretary has accused Putin of using the talks as a “smoke screen” while his forces regroup. “We don’t see a major Russian withdrawal or any major proposals on the negotiating table,” Foreign Secretary Liz Truss told The Times in London.
The British Ministry of Defense said in its latest intelligence assessment that the Kremlin was “surprised by the scale and ferocity of Ukrainian resistance” and “is currently pursuing a strategy of attrition” that is likely to include indiscriminate attacks.
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, during a visit to NATO ally Bulgaria on Saturday, said the Russian invasion “has stalled on a number of fronts” but the US has yet to see signs that Putin is deploying additional forces.
Across Ukraine, hospitals, schools and buildings where people sought refuge were attacked. Lyudmila Denisova, Ukraine’s parliamentary commissioner for human rights, said on Friday that at least 130 people survived Wednesday’s explosion at a Mariupol theater used as a shelter, but another 1,300 people are still inside.
“We pray that they are all alive, but so far there is no information about them,” Denisova told Ukrainian television.
Satellite images from Maxar Technologies taken on Friday show a long line of vehicles leaving Mariupol as people try to evacuate. Zelenskiy said more than 9,000 people were able to leave the city in the past 24 hours, via a route that leads 227 kilometers (141 miles) northwest to the city of Zaporozhye.
The governor of the Zaporizhia region Oleksandr Starukh announced a 38-hour curfew in the southeastern city after nine people were killed in two rocket attacks on its suburbs on Friday.
Over the past 24 hours, Russian forces have shelled eight cities and villages in the east of the Donetsk region: Mariupol, Avdiivka, Kramatorsk, Pokrovsk, Novoselidovka, Verkhnetoretske, Krymka and Stepne, the National Police of Ukraine said on Saturday.
As a result of rocket and heavy artillery shelling, dozens of civilians were killed and injured, at least 37 houses and infrastructure were damaged, according to a message published on Telegram.
“Among the civilian objects that Russia has destroyed are multi-storey and private houses, a school, a kindergarten, a museum, a shopping center and administrative buildings,” the report says.
___
Associated Press writer Yuri Karmanov in Lvov, Ukraine, and other AP journalists around the world contributed to this report.
___
Follow AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine.