Small victories encourage Ukraine; The West says the Russians are losing momentum

“Ukraine can win this war,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said, adding that the alliance must continue to offer military support to kyiv. He spoke by video link to the meeting as he recovers from a COVID-19 infection.

On the diplomatic front, both Finland and Sweden took steps to bring them closer to NATO membership despite Russian objections. Finland announced on Sunday that it was seeking to join NATO, saying that the invasion had changed the security landscape in Europe. Several hours later, Sweden’s ruling party endorsed the country’s membership offer, which could lead to an application within days.

If the two non-aligned Nordic nations become part of the alliance, it would represent an affront to russian president vladimir putin, who called NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe after the Cold War a threat to Russia. NATO says it is a purely defensive alliance.

While Moscow lost ground on the diplomatic front, Russian forces also failed to make any territorial gains in eastern Ukraine.

Ukraine has said it has halted Russian offensives in the east, and Western military officials have said the campaign Moscow launched there after its forces failed to take the capital kyiv has slowed to a crawl.

Meanwhile, Ukraine celebrated a morale-boosting victory in the Eurovision song contest. Folk-rap ensemble Kalush Orchestra won the dazzling pan-European competition with their song “Stefania,” which became an anthem among Ukrainians during the war.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy promised that his nation would claim the usual honor of the winner of hosting the next annual competition.

“Step by step, we are forcing the occupiers to leave the Ukrainian land,” Zelenskyy said.

The band’s leader, Oleh Psiuk, told a news conference on Sunday that the musicians were “ready to fight” when they returned home. The Ukrainian government prohibits men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country, but the six members of the boy band received special permission to go to Italy and represent Ukraine in the contest.

They will return to a country that is still struggling to survive.

Russian and Ukrainian fighters are engaged in an uphill battle for the industrial heartland of eastern Ukraine, the Donbas. Ukraine’s most experienced and well-equipped soldiers have been fighting Moscow-backed separatists for eight years.

Even with its setbacks, Russia continues to inflict death and destruction on Ukraine. Over the weekend, his forces attacked a chemical plant and 11 high-rise buildings in Siverodonetsk in Donbas, the regional governor said. Governor Serhii Haidaii said two people were killed in the shelling and warned residents still in the city to stay in underground shelters.

Russian missiles destroyed “military infrastructure facilities” in the Yavoriv district of western Ukraine, near the border with Poland, the governor of the Lviv region said. Lviv is a major gateway for Western-supplied weapons Ukraine has acquired during the war.

The Ukrainian military said it has stopped a renewed Russian offensive in the Donetsk area of ​​the Donbas. Russian troops also tried to advance near the eastern city of Izyum, but were stopped by Ukrainian forces, Kharkiv region governor Oleh Sinegubov said.

And Ukraine blew up two railway bridges that had been seized by Russian forces in the eastern Luhansk region, Ukraine’s Special Operations Command said on Sunday. He posted a video of bridges exploding on Facebook. The command also said it destroyed Russian lines of communication in the area to prevent Russia from bringing in more troops to attack the cities of Lisichansk and Severodonetsk, it said.

Ukraine’s claims could not be independently verified, but Western officials also painted a bleak picture for Russia.

Britain’s Defense Ministry said in its daily intelligence update that the Russian military had lost up to a third of the fighting force it committed to Ukraine in late February and was failing to gain substantial territory.

“Under current conditions, Russia is unlikely to drastically accelerate its rate of advance in the next 30 days,” the ministry said on Twitter.

Russia’s wartime performance reviews came as Russian troops withdrew from Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, which was a key military target early in the war and was shelled for weeks. The regional governor said there had been no shelling in the city for several days, although Russia continued to attack the wider Kharkiv region.

A Ukrainian battalion that had been fighting in the region reached the Russian border on Sunday and made a victorious video there directed at Zelenskyy.

In the video posted on Facebook by the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, a dozen fighters stood around a blue and yellow pole, the colors of Ukraine.

One explained that the unit went “to the dividing line with the Russian Federation, the occupying country. President, we have achieved it. We are here”.

Other fighters made victory signs and raised their fists.

Despite the continuing threat of missile strikes, many people were returning to their homes in Kharkiv and other Ukrainian cities, Anna Malyar, deputy director of the Defense Ministry, said on Sunday. The refugees were returning not only out of optimism that the war might subside.

“Living in such a place, not working, paying for housing, eating… they are forced to return for financial reasons,” he said in remarks carried by the RBK-Ukraine news agency.

In southern Donbas, the Azov seaport of Mariupol is now largely under Russian control, except for several hundred Ukrainian soldiers who have refused to surrender and remain in hiding at the Azovstal steel factory.

Many of their wives called on the global community to secure the release of “the entire garrison” during an online press conference. The women said the troops suffered severe shortages of food, water and medicine; untreated injuries sometimes led to sepsis.

Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office said regional prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation into Moscow’s alleged use of restricted incendiary bombs at the steel mill. International law allows some use of incendiary munitions, but prohibits their use to directly attack enemy personnel or civilians.

Turkey’s presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said the country had offered to evacuate wounded Ukrainian soldiers and civilians by boat from Azovstal, according to the official state broadcaster TRT.

The Ukraine invasion has other countries along Russia’s flank worried they may be next, including Finland, which shares a 1,340-kilometre (830-mile) land border and the Gulf of Finland with Russia. Putin told Finnish President Sauli Niinisto in a phone call on Saturday that joining NATO would be a “mistake.”

In Sweden, after the ruling Social Democratic Party on Sunday endorsed plans to join NATO, the plan was due to be debated in parliament on Monday, followed by a cabinet announcement.

However, NATO operates by consensus, and possible offers from the Nordic nations were questioned by Turkey’s concerns. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said he had discussed Turkey’s concerns at the NATO meeting, especially Sweden’s and Finland’s alleged support for Kurdish rebel groups and their restrictions on arms sales to Turkey. .

But during a Sunday visit to Sweden, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said Finland and Sweden would be “important additions” to NATO and the United States should quickly ratify their membership. McConnell is leading a delegation of Republican senators in the region. They paid a surprise visit to kyiv on Saturday in a show of support.

McQuillan reported from Lviv. Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Mstyslav Chernov and Andrea Rosa in Kharkiv, Elena Becatoros in Odessa, and other AP employees around the world contributed to this report.