By PTI
KYIV: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has again appealed to Russia to negotiate an end to the war, but says Ukraine would not agree to give up any of its territory for the sake of peace.
In his nightly video address to the nation Friday, Zelenskyy appeared to be responding to Col. Gen Sergei Rudskoi, deputy chief of the Russian general staff, who said Russian forces would now focus on “the main goal, the liberation of Donbas.”
Russian-backed separatists have controlled part of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine since 2014, and Russian forces have been battling to seize more of the region from Ukraine, including the besieged city of Mariupol.
Rudskoi’s statement also was a suggestion that Russia may be backing away from trying to take Kyiv and other major cities where its offensive has stalled.
Zelenskyy noted that Russian forces have lost thousands of troops but still haven’t been able to take Kyiv or Kharkiv, the second-largest city.
The Associated Press has independently documented at least 34 assaults on Ukrainian medical facilities by Russian forces.
AP journalists in Ukraine have seen firsthand the deadly results of Russian strikes on civilian targets, including the final moments of children whose bodies were shredded by shrapnel and dozens of corpses heaped into mass graves.
AP journalists outside Ukraine have confirmed the details of other attacks by interviewing survivors and independently verifying war zone videos and photos posted online.
The accounting is part of the War Crimes Watch Ukraine project, a broader effort by AP and PBS “Frontline” to track evidence of potential war crimes for the duration of the conflict.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights confirms at least 1,035 civilians, including 90 children, have died and another 1,650 civilians have been wounded since the war started a month ago.
Those numbers are certainly an undercount since scores of bodies now lie under the rubble of demolished buildings or were hurriedly buried in mass graves, or the deaths occurred in areas now under Russian control.
A senior US defense official says Russia’s military advance on Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv appears to have halted as it turns its focus to fighting elsewhere in the country.
The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe an internal US military assessment of the war, said Friday that Russia appears to be concentrating more on fighting for control of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region rather than its ground offensive aimed at capturing Kyiv, at least for now.
The Kremlin seemed to confirm the shift Friday.
Col.-Gen Sergei Rudskoi, deputy chief of the Russian general staff, said that the main objective of the first stage of the operation, reducing Ukraine’s fighting capacity, has “generally been accomplished,” allowing Russian forces to focus on “the main goal, the liberation of Donbas.”
The Donbas is the largely Russian-speaking eastern industrial heartland of Ukraine where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian forces since 2014.
