Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said his country would overcome “dark times” in an emotional address at Kyiv’s 1,000-year-old Saint Sophia Cathedral to mark Orthodox Easter as fighting in the east overshadowed religious celebrations.
Mr Zelenskiy’s remarks come as Ukraine is set to ask US secretary of state Antony Blinken and defence secretary Lloyd Austin for more powerful weapons. The request will likley come during an expected visit by the US officials to Kyiv on Sunday.
The trip by Mr Blinken and Mr Austin, announced earlier by President Zelenskiy, would be the highest-level visit to Ukraine by US officials since the invasion of the country two months ago.
The White House has not confirmed any visit by the US pair. And the state department and Pentagon declined to comment.
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After stiff Ukrainian resistance forced a Russian retreat from Kyiv, Moscow’s assault is now concentrated on the eastern Donbas region and the south of the country. With a semblance of normal life returning to the capital, several countries have reopened embassies in recent days and some residents who fled the fighting returned for Easter.
Ukrainian officials plan to tell Mr Blinken and Mr Austin of the immediate need for more weapons, including anti-missile systems, anti-aircraft systems, armoured vehicles and tanks, Zelenskiy aide Igor Zhovkva told NBC News on Sunday.
The United States and Nato allies have shown growing readiness to supply heavier equipment and more advanced weapons systems. Britain has promised to send military vehicles and is considering supplying British tanks to Poland to release Warsaw’s Russian-designed T-72s for deployment in Ukraine.
Serhiy Gaidai, governor of the Luhansk region in the Donbas, said Easter celebrations had been shattered there, with seven churches in his region hit by Russian artillery. He also said an unspecified number of civilians were killed by Russian shelling.
This could not be independently verified.
Russia denies targeting civilians and rejects what Ukraine says is evidence of atrocities, saying Kyiv staged them to undermine peace talks. Russia also said on Sunday that a village in its Belgorod region bordering Ukraine was shelled from across the frontier, state news agency Tass quoted a local official as saying.
Vladimir Pertsev, the official, said there were no casualties or damage after one projectile landed in a field, according to Tass.
Meanwhile, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan said after talks by phone with Mr Zelenskiy that Ankara was ready to assist in negotiations with Russia. The Ukrainian president said he and Mr Erdogan discussed the need for immediate evacuation of civilians from the southern city of Mariupol, site of biggest battle of the conflict.
Russian forces are attempting to storm the Azovstal steel works in Mariupol by land, supported by aerial and artillery bombardment, claimed Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych.
“Russian troops are trying to finish off the defenders of Azovstal and more than 1,000 civilians who are hiding at the plant,” wrote Mr Arestovych on Facebook.
Moscow has previously declared victory in the city and said it did not need to take the plant.
Capturing Mariupol would link pro-Russian separatists who control parts of the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk that make up the Donbas with the southern Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which Moscow seized in 2014.
Ukraine estimates thousands of civilians have been killed in Mariupol and says 100,000 are still in the city. The UN and Red Cross say the civilian toll is at least in the thousands.
Humanitarian corridors
Ecumenical patriarch Bartholomew, the spiritual head of eastern Orthodox Christians worldwide, called for humanitarian corridors in Mariupol and other areas of Ukraine where he said “an indescribable human tragedy is unfolding”.
Russian strikes on Saturday severed an arterial gas pipeline and caused a fire at an electricity substation, cutting gas supply to 5,500 people in Luhansk, said Mr Gaidai.
British military intelligence said Ukrainian resistance had been strong, especially in the Donbas, despite Russian gains.
Russia said on Sunday its missiles hit eight military targets overnight, including four arms depots in the Kharkiv region and one facility in the Dnipropetrovsk region producing explosives for the Ukrainian army.
Moscow said on Saturday its missiles destroyed a logistics terminal in the southern city of Odesa containing weapons supplied by the United States and European states.
Pope Francis called for an Easter truce.
“Stop the attacks in order to help the exhausted population,” he said.
Ukrainian refugees filled churches across central Europe.
“I pray that this horror in Ukraine ends soon and we can return home,” said Nataliya Krasnopolskaia, who fled to Prague from Odesa last month, one of the more than five million Ukrainians estimated to have fled the country. – Reuters