President Volodymyr Zelenskyi has promised that Ukraine will not back down in its fight to regain territory lost to Russia.
Sunday’s pledge came as the UK said Russian forces would step up raids on civilian infrastructure, and a senior US general warned it was unclear how Moscow would respond to its battlefield setbacks in Ukraine.
Zelenskyi said Ukrainian forces would keep up the pressure on Russia.
“Perhaps it seems to some of you now that after a string of wins, we’re in kind of a lull now,” he said in his late-night video address. “But this is not a break. This is the preparation for the next series… Because Ukraine has to be free – everything.”
Ukraine’s military said its forces repelled attacks by Russian troops in the areas of the Kharkiv region to the east and Kherson to the south, where Ukraine launched counter-offensives this month, as well as parts of neighboring Donetsk. It was said that Ukrainian troops had advanced to the east bank of the Oskil River in the Kharkiv region.
“Since yesterday, Ukraine has controlled the east bank,” it said on Telegram.
Serhiy Haidai, governor of the neighboring Luhansk region, said this meant that the “de-occupation” of his region was “not far off”.
As Russian shells hit towns and cities over the weekend, Britain’s MoD warned that Moscow was likely to step up attacks on civilian targets as it suffered battlefield defeats.
“Over the past seven days, Russia has stepped up attacks on civilian infrastructure, although it is unlikely to see an immediate military impact,” the ministry said in an online briefing. “Faced with setbacks at the front lines, Russia has likely broadened the range of attacks to try to directly undermine the morale of the Ukrainian people and government.”
US Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, meanwhile, called for vigilance after visiting a base in Poland supporting Ukraine’s war effort. His comments recalled the risks of escalation as the US and its NATO allies help Ukraine from afar.
“The war is not going so well for Russia right now, so it’s incumbent on all of us to maintain a high state of preparedness and alert,” he said after his trip to the base, which reporters traveling with him were not asked to identify.
Putin, warn Biden
However, Russian President Vladimir Putin has repelled Ukraine’s rapid counter-offensive, saying Moscow will respond more vigorously if its troops continue to be pressured.
Such repeated threats have raised concerns that Putin may eventually turn to small nuclear weapons or chemical warfare.
When asked what he would say to Putin if he considered using such weapons, US President Joe Biden replied in an interview with CBS’ 60 Minutes: “No. Not. Not. It would change the face of war like it had not since World War II.”
Some military analysts have said Russia could also stage a nuclear incident at Zaporizhzhia, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, which is held by Russia but operated by Ukrainian personnel. Moscow and Kyiv have accused each other of shelling the power plant, which damaged buildings and cut power lines needed to keep it cool and safe.
Police and experts are working on a mass grave site discovered after Russians were pushed back by Ukrainian forces [Gleb Garanich/ Reuters]
A senior Vatican envoy reportedly came under fire in the city of Zaporizhia on Saturday while helping to distribute humanitarian aid there. The incident forced Vatican Almoner Cardinal Konrad Krajewski and others to take cover, Vatican News Service said on Sunday. No injuries were reported.
“For the first time in my life, I didn’t know where to walk. Because it’s not enough to run, you have to know where you’re going,” said the Polish-born cardinal, whose office makes charitable contributions on behalf of the pope.
Ukrainian officials, meanwhile, reported that large parts of the country continued to be shelled.
Russian fire on Saturday killed four medics trying to evacuate a psychiatric hospital in the Kharkiv region, Governor Oleh Syniehubov said. Two patients were injured in the attack in Strelecha, he said.
Night shelling also hit a hospital in Mykolaiv, a major Black Sea port, regional governor Vitaliy Kim said. And Russian attacks in the eastern Donetsk region over the past day killed five civilians, and in Nikopol, further west, several dozen apartment buildings, gas lines and power lines were hit, according to regional governors.
Separately, the pro-Russian separatists, who control much of Donetsk, accused Ukraine of shelling a POW colony in Olenivka, saying one prisoner was killed and four wounded in the attacks.
Al Jazeera has not been able to independently verify the battlefield reports.
“still scared”
In areas retaken by Russian troops, returning Ukrainians searched for their dead relatives.
In Izyum, where Ukrainian officials said they found 440 bodies at a forest grave, Volodymyr Kolesnyk tried to match numbers on wooden crosses with names on a neatly handwritten list to locate relatives he said had died earlier this year were killed in an air raid war. Kolesnyk told Portal he got the list from a local undertaker who dug the graves.
“They buried the bodies in sacks, without coffins, without anything. I wasn’t allowed here at first. she [Russians] said it was taken down 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 found a basement where Russian forces allegedly tortured prisoners in Kozacha Lopan, near the border with Russia. In pictures they released, they showed a Russian TA-57 military phone with extra wires and alligator clips attached. Ukrainian officials have accused Russian forces of using the Soviet-era cellular phones as a power source to shock detainees during interrogations.
The Ukrainians’ claims could not be immediately verified.
Elsewhere in the region, residents of towns recaptured after six months of Russian occupation have returned with a mixture of joy and trepidation.
“I still have this feeling that at any moment a shell could explode or a plane could fly over it,” said Nataliia Yelistratova, who traveled 80 km (50 miles) on a train from Kharkiv to her hometown of Balakliya, um, with her husband and daughter to find their block of flats intact but devastated by shelling.
“I’m still scared to be here,” she said after spotting a piece of splinter stuck in a wall.