US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin will travel to Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky on Sunday. This will be the first high-level US trip to the city since the start of the war on February 24.
Zelensky told a news conference at a metro station on Saturday that Ukraine would ask the United States for more heavy weapons to defeat Russia. “As soon as we have [more weapons]”If there are enough of them, believe me, we will immediately regain this or that territory, which is temporarily occupied,” Zelenski said.
The Ukrainian president also spoke at length about possible peace talks with Russia, saying that if Moscow killed defenders of Mariupol – or continued with the independence referendum in the partially occupied southern regions of Kherson and Zaporozhye – Ukraine would suspend peace talks with Moscow.
During attacks on Orthodox Easter, Russian forces raided cities in southern and eastern Ukraine. A three-month-old baby was among eight killed when Russia fired cruise missiles at the Black Sea port city of Odessa, officials said. Eighteen more were injured.
Six civilians were killed in separate strikes in Girske, a village in the eastern Luhansk region, the region’s governor Sergei Gaidai said.
Two Russian generals were killed near Kherson, according to a statement from Ukraine’s defense ministry. Another is in critical condition. The Ukrainian military on Friday struck the command post of the 49th Russian Army near the occupied regional capital, the ministry said.
The fate of the Ukrainians in the scattered and besieged steel plant in Mariupol was not immediately clear. Earlier on Saturday, a Ukrainian military released a video that was reportedly filmed two days earlier, in which women and children hid underground, some for two months, said they longed to see the sun.
Another attempt to evacuate women, children and the elderly from Mariupol failed on Saturday. Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to the mayor of Mariupol, said Russian forces had not allowed Ukrainian-organized buses to take residents to Zaporozhye, a city 227 km (141 miles) northwest.
The US-based Institute for War Studies has published its latest analysis, warning that Russian forces are likely to increase the scale of ground offensive operations in the coming days. He predicted that Russia would likely continue to attack southeast of Izyum, west of Kremina and Popasna, and north of Donetsk via Avdievka or another axis. Russian forces will try to starve other defenders of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol and will not allow trapped civilians to evacuate, it added.
Satellite images released this week show what appear to be two recently excavated sites for mass graves near cemeteries in two cities near Mariupol, and local authorities have accused Russia of burying thousands of civilians to cover up the massacre. The Kremlin did not comment on the photos.
Russia has said it has taken control of several villages elsewhere in the eastern Donbass region and destroyed 11 Ukrainian military targets on Saturday, including three artillery depots. Russian attacks also hit settlements.
The UK Ministry of Defense has released an intelligence update detailing allegations that Russia plans to deploy Ukrainian civilians in the Kherson and Zaporizhia regions.
Nearly 5.2 million people have fled Ukraine because of the war. The number of Ukrainians who left the country after the Russian invasion is now 5,163,686, the UN refugee agency said.
One-third of Russian gas exported to the European Union could be affected by the war, says the head of Ukraine’s state-owned gas company Naftogaz.
Reuters, the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse contributed to the report
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