Russian forces now occupy one-fifth of his country’s territory, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Thursday, offering a startling perspective on how the biggest international conflict in Europe since World War II has sundered a nation on the borders of the EU and Nato.
The Ukrainian territory now controlled by Russia, he added, was comparable to the area of the Netherlands.
“If you look at the entire front line, and it is, of course, not straight, this line is more than a thousand kilometres,” Zelensky said in a video address to the parliament of Luxembourg. “Just imagine! Constant fighting, which stretched along the front line for more than a thousand kilometres.”
Russian forces have withdrawn from around the capital, Kyiv, in the north of Ukraine after failing to capture it early in the conflict. But Zelensky said fighting is raging along a long crescent-shaped front, from around the northeastern city of Kharkiv to the outskirts of the city of Mykolaiv, near the Black Sea, in the south.
Zelensky did not say how much new territory Russia has seized since it launched its invasion on February 24. In 2014, Moscow seized the Crimea region in the south, where its Black Sea fleet is based, and Russia-backed separatists took over parts of the Donbas region, which borders Russia to the east.
Russia made its swiftest and largest gains in the first weeks of the war, capturing land in the south, east and around Kharkiv. Its most significant single gain was the southern port city of Mariupol, which it wrested from Ukrainian control in May after months of fighting and artillery attacks that killed thousands and left the city in ruins.
Zelensky said that Russian troops have occupied a total of 3,620 population settlements, which includes cities, towns and villages, but, in a sign of the war’s shifting dynamics, he said that Ukraine has “liberated” 1,017 of those places.
In another measure of the war’s toll, Zelensky said that about 14,000 Ukrainian civilians and service members have been killed in the war since February. At least 1.5 million people have fled their homes to elsewhere in the country and about 5 million have fled abroad as refugees.
The UN estimated last week that about 4,000 civilians have been killed in Ukraine. Russia has not released casualty figures since late March, when it said 1,351 soldiers had died, but Zelensky said Ukrainian officials believe at least 30,000 Russian troops have been killed.
Sievierodonetsk battle
Ukrainian troops pushed Russian soldiers back several blocks in street battles in the city of Sievierodonetsk, a regional official said on Thursday, indicating that fighting continued even as Russia renewed its effort to surround Ukrainian soldiers in the city.
The fighting has become a focus of the war as a creeping Russian advance in eastern Ukraine has brought Russian soldiers close to cutting the last supply line to the Ukrainian soldiers inside the city.
New York Times News Service