Fresh off his country’s Eurovision win, a defiant Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has vowed to one day host the song contest in the embattled city of Mariupol, which is almost entirely in Russian hands.
“Russia’s Donbas offensive has lost momentum and fallen significantly behind schedule,” the ministry said on Twitter, adding that the forces are suffering “continued low morale and reduced combat effectiveness.”
Russia has been targeting rail facilities and other critical infrastructure in and around Lviv, which is near the Polish border and has been a major gateway for NATO-supplied weapons. Russian forces control a horseshoe-shaped swath of territory in the Ukrainian areas of Donetsk and Luhansk, which make up the Donbas region, the border area where Ukraine has battled Moscow-backed separatists since 2014.
Airstrikes and artillery barrages make it extremely dangerous for journalists to move around in the east, hindering efforts to get a full picture of the fighting. But it appears to be a back-and-forth slog without major breakthroughs on either side. Kharkiv, which is near the Russian border and only 80 kilometers southwest of the Russian city of Belgorod, has undergone weeks of intense shelling. The largely Russian-speaking city with a prewar population of 1.4 million was a key military objective earlier in the war, when Moscow hoped to capture and hold major cities.
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