ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine (AP) — U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with Ukraine’s president during a visit to the country’s beleaguered capital, kyiv.
Pelosi, second in line to the presidency after the vice president, is the highest-ranking American leader to visit Ukraine since the start of the war, and her visit marks a major show of continued support for the country’s fight against Russia. .
Images released early Sunday by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office showed Pelosi in kyiv with a congressional delegation that included Jason Crow, Jim McGovern and Adam Schiff.
Zelenskyy greeted the delegation outdoors before moving into a meeting room where he said, “I appreciate this sign of strong support from the United States, the people and the Congress: bicameral and bipartisan support.”
“This shows that the United States today is a leader in its strong support for Ukraine during the war against the aggression of the Russian Federation,” Zelenskyy said.
Pelosi told Zelenskyy: “We think we visited him to thank him for his fight for freedom.”
“We are on a border of freedom and their fight is a fight for everyone. Our commitment is to be there for you until the fight is over,” Pelosi added.
The visit was not previously announced.
THIS IS A LAST MINUTE UPDATE. The previous AP story follows below.
Some women and children were evacuated from a steel plant that is the last defensive bastion in the bombed-out ruins of the port city of Mariupol, a Ukrainian official and Russian state news organizations said, but hundreds are believed to remain trapped with little food. water or medicine.
The United Nations was working to negotiate an evacuation of up to 1,000 civilians living below the sprawling Soviet-era Azovstal plant after numerous previous attempts failed. Ukraine has not said how many fighters are also at the plant, the only part of Mariupol not occupied by Russian forces, but Russia put the number at around 2,000. An estimated 100,000 civilians remain in the city.
UN humanitarian spokesman Saviano Abreu said the world organization was negotiating with authorities in Moscow and kyiv but could not provide details about the ongoing evacuation effort “due to the complexity and fluidity of the operation.”
“Right now, there are ongoing high-level engagements with all governments, Russia and Ukraine, to make sure they can save civilians and support the evacuation of civilians from the plant,” Abreu told AP. He did not confirm the video posted on social media allegedly showing UN-branded vehicles in Mariupol.
Ukraine has blamed the failure of numerous previous evacuation attempts on continued Russian bombardment.
In the town of Lyman in the Donetsk region, where at least half the population has fled Russian bombing, around 20 elderly people and children with bags in their hands along with their dogs and cats boarded a minivan marked with a placard. that said “evacuation of children” in Ukrainian. . It sped towards the city of Dnipro as explosions could be heard in the distance.
“The liberators have come and have freed us from what? Our lives?” said Nina Mihaylenko, a professor of Russian language and literature, referring to the Russian forces.
Galina Zuev and her husband Aleksander chose to stay because they were unwilling to leave the place where they had spent their entire lives.
“I am not living very well. Here is a war. They are bombing all the time. Windows have been broken in our house. The missiles are in the yards,” said Galina, 68. “It’s frightening”.
Russian forces have embarked on a major military operation to seize significant parts of southern and eastern Ukraine, the country’s industrial heartland. Ukrainian forces fought village by village on Saturday to contain the Russian advance.
Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency said on Saturday that 19 adults and six children had been taken from the steelworks, but gave no further details.
A senior official from the Azov Regiment, the Ukrainian unit defending the plant, said 20 civilians were evacuated during a ceasefire, although it was not clear if he was referring to the same group. There was no UN confirmation.
“They are women and children,” Sviatoslav Palamar said in a video posted on the regiment’s Telegram channel. He also called for the evacuation of the wounded: “We do not know why they are not taken away and their evacuation to the territory controlled by Ukraine is not discussed.”
Video and images from inside the plant, shared with The Associated Press by two Ukrainian women who said their husbands are among the fighters refusing to surrender there, he showed unidentified men in stained bandages; others had open wounds or amputated limbs.
A skeleton medical staff was treating at least 600 injured people, said the women, who identified their husbands as members of the Azov Regiment of Ukraine’s National Guard. Some of the wounds were rotting with gangrene, they said.
In the video, the men said they eat just once a day and share as little as 1.5 liters (50 ounces) of water a day between four people, and that supplies inside the besieged facility are depleted.
A shirtless man appeared to be in pain as he described his injuries: two broken ribs, a punctured lung and a dislocated arm that was “hanging from the flesh.”
“I want to say to everyone who sees this: If you don’t stop this here in Ukraine, it will go further, to Europe,” he said.
The AP was unable to independently verify the date and location of the video, which the women say was taken last week in the maze of corridors and bunkers below the plant.
The women urged that Ukrainian fighters also be evacuated along with civilians, warning that they could be tortured and executed if captured. “Soldiers’ lives also matter,” Yuliia Fedusiuk told the AP in Rome.
In his late-night video address Saturday night, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy switched to Russian to urge Russian troops not to fight in Ukraine, saying even his generals expect thousands more to die.
The president accused Moscow of recruiting new soldiers “with little motivation and little combat experience” so that units destroyed early in the war can return to battle.
“Each Russian soldier can still save his own life,” Zelenskyy said. “It is better for you to survive in Russia than to perish on our land.”
In other developments:
— Ukraine’s Deputy Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotsky said in televised remarks that Russian forces have seized hundreds of thousands of tons of grain in territory under their control. Ukraine is a major grain producer, and the invasion has pushed up world prices and raised concerns about shortages.
— A Russian rocket attack destroyed an airport runway in Odessa, Ukraine’s third-most populous city and a key Black Sea port, the Ukrainian military said.
— The bodies of three men were found buried in a forest near the kyiv suburb of Bucha, the police chief of the kyiv region said. The men, whose bodies were found on Friday, had been tortured before they were shot in the head, Andriy Nebytov wrote on Facebook. Ukrainian officials have alleged that retreating Russian troops carried out mass killings of civilians in Bucha.
— Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview that Russian and Ukrainian negotiators talk “almost every day.” However, he told the Chinese state news agency Xinhua, “progress has not been easy.”
— Two buses sent to evacuate residents of the eastern city of Popasna came under fire and contact with organizers was lost. Mayor Nikolai Khanatov said: “We know that (the buses) arrived in the city and then were attacked by an enemy reconnaissance and sabotage group.”
Getting a full picture of the unfolding battle in eastern Ukraine has been difficult because airstrikes and artillery shelling have made it extremely dangerous for reporters to move. In addition, both the Ukrainian and Moscow-backed rebels have introduced strict restrictions on reporting from the combat zone.
But Western military analysts suggested the offensive in the Donbas region, which includes Mariupol, was going much slower than planned. So far, Russian troops and separatists appear to have made only minor gains in the month since Moscow said it would concentrate its military force in the east.
Numerically, Russia’s military manpower vastly outnumbers Ukraine’s. In the days before the war began, Western intelligence estimated that Russia had stationed as many as 190,000 troops near the border; Ukraine’s standing army numbers about 200,000, spread throughout the country.
With plenty of firepower still in reserve, Russia’s offensive could still escalate and overwhelm the Ukrainians. Overall, the Russian military has an estimated 900,000 active duty personnel. Russia also has a much larger air force and navy.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in military assistance have poured into Ukraine since the war began, but Russia’s vast arsenals mean that Ukraine will continue to need large amounts of support.
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Fisch reported from Sloviansk. Associated Press writers Jon Gambrell and Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Mstyslav Chernov in Kharkiv, Lolita C. Baldor in Washington, Trisha Thompson in Rome, and AP staff around the world contributed to this report.
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Reference-news.yahoo.com