Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called on Saturday for comprehensive peace talks with Moscow to stop its invasion of Ukraine, saying it would otherwise take Russia “several generations” to recover from its losses in the war.
Russian forces have taken heavy losses and their advance has largely stalled since President Vladimir Putin launched the assault on Feb. 24, with long columns of troops that bore down on Kyiv halted in its suburbs.
But they have laid siege to cities, blasting urban areas to rubble, and in recent days have intensified missile attacks on scattered targets in western Ukraine, away from the main battlefields in the north and east. On Saturday, Russia said its hypersonic missiles had destroyed a large underground depot for missiles and aircraft ammunition in the western Ivano-Frankivsk region. Hypersonic weapons can travel faster than five times the speed of sound and the Interfax agency said it was the first time Russia had used them in Ukraine. A spokesperson for the Ukrainian Air Force Command confirmed the attack, but said the Ukrainian side had no information on the type of missiles used. Ukrainian authorities said on Saturday they have not seen any significant shifts over the past 24 hours in front line areas, noting the cities of Mariupol, Mykolaiv and Kherson in the south and Izyum in the east continued to see the heaviest fighting. More than 3.3 million refugees have already fled Ukraine through its western border, with around 2 more million displaced inside the country. Efforts to evacuate civilians from cities under siege through “humanitarian corridors” continued. Ukrainian authorities said they hoped to open 10 such evacuation routes on Saturday.
Unprecedented Western sanctions aimed at crippling Russia’s economy and starving its war machine have yet to halt what Putin calls a “special operation” to disarm its neighbour and purge it of “Nazis”. Kyiv and its allies have called this a baseless pretext for war. –Reuters
