Exactly five months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine started, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed his confidence in victory. “This war has not broken Ukraine and will not break our country,” the head of state wrote on the Telegram news platform on Sunday.
His Russian colleague Vladimir Putin ordered the attack on 24 February on the pretext, among other things, of feeling threatened by the neighbouring country’s desire to join NATO’s nuclear power. As a result, the siege of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, stalled, after which the Kremlin moved the battlefield to the Donbas in the east.
Despite the presence of pro-Russian separatists in the self-proclaimed independent republics of Luhansk and Donetsk, the battle there also did not go as planned, despite the surplus of Russian firepower. “We are not giving up. We will protect what is ours. We are going to win,” Zelenski said confidently.
Kyiv calls on the United States and other NATO countries almost daily to provide more heavy weapons to stop the Russian advance and liberate the occupied territories. On Saturday, an American delegation was in the Ukrainian capital for consultations.
On Sunday, on the 151st day of the war, the Ukrainian General Staff again reported attacks from the Russian side, focusing on the regions of Donetsk and Kharkiv. In some places, the enemy would have been pushed back. The army command also said that 40,000 Russian soldiers had been killed since the start of the war.
Western experts assume that this number is exaggerated. Moscow last made a statement about the losses at the end of March. At the time, the Russian Defense Ministry spoke of 1,351 dead, but then it was clear that there must be many more.
