Ukraine: Top US Officials Visit and The Return of WWII to The Eastern Front
Ukraine observed a solemn Orthodox Easter on Sunday as Russia’s offensive in the east claimed more lives, and as President Volodymyr Zelensky was preparing for a milestone visit later in the day from two top American officials.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, who were expected to arrive in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, in the early afternoon for a brief visit, would be the highest-level U.S. officials to travel to Ukraine since Russia invaded two months ago. Their visit underscored the Biden administration’s increasingly muscular approach to the war, as Ukraine’s Western allies race to supply heavy weapons and equipment to fend off Russia’s renewed onslaught in the eastern region known as the Donbas.
 |
Rejecting calls from Ukrainians and humanitarian organizations for a cease-fire over the Orthodox Easter holiday, Russian forces continued to bombard towns and villages across Ukraine over the weekend.
Before dawn on Sunday, two young girls, aged 5 and 14, were killed when their home in the Donetsk region, near the eastern border with Russia, was destroyed, according to the Donetsk Regional Military Administration.
Igor Zhovkva, an adviser to President Zelensky, criticized AntĂ³nio Guterres, the U.N. secretary-general, for planning to travel to Moscow this week. Speaking to NBC's "Meet the Press," he said the U.N. should focus more on providing humanitarian support to Ukraine.
When Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal of Ukraine was asked on CBS’s “Face the Nation” if the atrocities committed in Mariupol by Russian forces could diminish the possibility of a diplomatic end to the war, he replied: “Russia has done many atrocities and many war crimes in Ukraine. But we understand that this terrible war could be finished only on the table of negotiations.”
Igor Zhovkva, an adviser to President Zelensky, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” said that, despite claims from Russia that it had taken control of Mariupol, Ukrainian forces and civilians remained in the city. He added that many soldiers were wounded. “Today, we turn to Russian authorities to open the humanitarian corridors for civilians,” he said.
Ukrainian lawmaker Yevheniya Kravchuk told ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” that the expected visit by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin would send “a powerful signal to Russia that Ukraine will not be left alone with this war.”
A few weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, Valerie Glodan, wrote in a post on Instagram that she was living with “a new level of happiness” after she gave birth to her first child.
“Our girl is one month old now,” she wrote in the post, showing a photograph taken in late pregnancy. “It has been the best 40 weeks.”
Warsaw’s biggest pediatric hospital has put patients from Ukraine on its waiting list for liver transplants, sometimes ahead of Polish children. Schools in Poland’s capital have had to search for extra teachers to keep up with the influx of new pupils. Public transport has risked buckling under the strain of so many new residents.
Yet to just about everyone’s surprise, Warsaw has kept working, defying predictions of a breakdown and an angry public backlash. The city, which has welcomed hundreds of thousands of fleeing refugees, has decked itself with Ukrainian flags and banners of support for Poland’s war-ravaged eastern neighbor.
BOBRYK, Ukraine — A few dozen faithful stood, tightly packed, in the one part of their church that remained whole: a tiny room meant for private worship, not a holiday crowd.
The main chapel of the Voznesenska Church, or Church of the Ascension, in this village northeast of Kyiv is now a ruin after a Russian rocket tore through the roof, exploded inside, and destroyed treasured religious objects.
Plaster peeled from the walls. A spray of shrapnel pierced the iconostasis, the traditional wall of icons in Orthodox churches. One shard had ripped through the head of an icon of Jesus Christ.
Germany
On the evening of Dec. 9, 2005, 17 days after Gerhard Schröder left office as chancellor of Germany, he got a call on his cellphone. It was his friend President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
Mr. Putin was pressing Mr. Schröder to accept an offer to lead the shareholder committee of Nord Stream, the Russian-controlled company in charge of building the first undersea gas pipeline directly connecting Russia and Germany.
The Red Cross says it is ‘deeply alarmed’ by conditions in Mariupol, as Russia continues to bombard.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said on Sunday that it was “deeply alarmed” by the situation in Mariupol, calling for unimpeded access to help residents, including hundreds of wounded.
Russian forces continued on Sunday to drop heavy bombs from the air and direct artillery fire at the sprawling Azovstal steel factory, where a few thousand Ukrainian soldiers and civilians are holed up, according Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the Ukrainian president.
There were signs, he said, that Russian troops were gathering around the plant for a possible assault despite President Vladimir V. Putin’s televised announcement last week in which he ordered his defense minister not to storm the facility, but to blockade it instead.
“New facts about the crimes of the occupiers against our Mariupol residents are being revealed,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said overnight Sunday. “New graves of people killed by the occupiers are being found. We are talking about tens of thousands of dead Mariupol residents.”
At a news conference on Saturday, Mr. Zelensky said that if the civilians and soldiers in the steel factory were killed, Ukraine would “withdraw from any negotiation process.”
The Red Cross has tried repeatedly in recent weeks to send a humanitarian convoy to Mariupol to help treat injured people and evacuate the remaining civilians, but violence has stymied the efforts. Tens of thousands of civilians are believed still to be in the city, out of a prewar population of nearly half a million.
“Immediate and unimpeded humanitarian access is urgently required to allow for the voluntary safe passage of thousands of civilians and hundreds of wounded out of the city, including from the Azovstal plant area,” the group said.
Ukrainian officials say that 20,000 civilians have been killed in the Russian assault on the southeastern port city, which Moscow’s forces have failed to control completely despite two months of attacks. Far from their families, Ukrainian soldiers celebrate Easter.
KYIV, Ukraine — The Ukrainian soldiers took their jackets off, squinting under the rising sun as the Rev. Taras Melnyk blessed them and their traditional Easter bread with holy water on Saturday.
For a brief moment, the dozens of soldiers under towering pines seemed to lose themselves in the prayers and blessings that come on the holiest day of the year for Orthodox Christians. Far from their families, unable to celebrate Easter Sunday for military reasons, they were able to enjoy one tradition: paska, a sweet bread. They joked that Father Melnyk had brought with him the first taste of spring sunshine after more than two months of the war. Poland
Russian attacks targeting the towns of Gorske and Zolote in the eastern Luhansk region killed six people on Saturday, the region’s governor, Sergiy Haidai, said in a Telegram post. Two women were also found dead under a house that collapsed from shelling in the city of Popasna.
Reporting from Krakow, Poland
Russian troops are suffering from poor morale and have not taken time to “reconstitute, re-equip and reorganize” for offensives in the east, “likely hindering” their ability to combat strong Ukrainian resistance in the Donbas region, according to the British Defense Ministry’s latest assessment.
For the past nine weeks, photographers with The New York Times and other news organizations throughout Ukraine have chronicled the ordeal of war.
A rocket barrage slammed into central Kharkiv last week, lighting apartment buildings and a market on fire. At least three people were killed and five were wounded, according to police officials, though that number is expected to rise.
Ukrainian families arrived in the south-central city of Zaporizhzhia on Thursday after fleeing from Mariupol, the port city that has been a scene of intense fighting and destruction.
In his nightly address, President Volodymyr Zelensky noted that it was Holy Saturday of the Eastern Orthodox Easter weekend, which most of Ukraine is celebrating. “But there will be a resurrection,” said the president, who is Jewish, using the story of Easter for inspiration. “Life will defeat death.” He asked people to stay home and wait until morning to head out for church over safety concerns.
Reporting from Kharkiv, Ukraine
A series of artillery strikes hit an industrial area in central Kharkiv and an abandoned mall in the city’s east on Saturday, as Russia’s campaign in eastern Ukraine continued to batter cities and test Ukrainian defensive positions.
There were no casualties in the strike on central Kharkiv, officials said. In recent days, shelling has intensified around the city, which had been Ukraine’s second-largest before the invasion set off the flight of thousands of people. Ukrainian forces have tried to counterattack Russian units arrayed around the city's periphery, and fighting has taken place in the vicinity of the city since the earliest days of the war.
One of the three areas bombed Saturday afternoon included a large residential area in Kharkiv. A strike there hit a warehouse in the Saltivka neighborhood, and in the aftermath of the bombings, emergency crews raced to respond to fires.
Comments