Ukraine rules out any ceasefire agreement that involves ceding territory to Russia

Ukraine has said it will not agree to any ceasefire deal that would hand over territory to Russia, as Moscow stepped up its attack on the eastern Donbas region on Sunday.

“The war must end with the full restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty,” Ukraine’s presidential chief of staff Andriy Yermak said in a Twitter post.

Polish President Andrzej Duda offered Warsaw’s backing, telling politicians in kyiv that the international community had to demand Russia’s full withdrawal and that sacrificing part of Ukraine’s territory would be a “major blow” to the West.

“Worrying voices have appeared saying that Ukraine should give in to Putin’s demands,” Duda said, in the first in-person speech to the Ukrainian parliament by a foreign leader since Russia’s invasion on February 24. “Only Ukraine has the right to decide on its future,” he said.

On Saturday, Ukraine’s chief negotiator in the stalled peace talks, Mykhailo Podolyak, said: “Any concession to Russia is not a path to peace, but a war postponed for several years. Ukraine does not trade either with its sovereignty or with the territories and the Ukrainians living in them.”

Hours earlier, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy had suggested that his government was willing to resume talks with Russia as long as Moscow did not kill Ukrainian troops who had been defending the Azovstal steel mill in Mariupol.

After calls for an immediate ceasefire by US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, Podolyak made it clear that Ukraine would not accept any agreement with Russia that would involve ceding territory. , and that accepting a ceasefire now while making concessions to Russia would backfire on Ukraine because “Moscow would hit back the hardest after any break in the fighting.”

Meanwhile, on Sunday, Russian forces continued their bombardment of Ukraine’s frontline cities, waging a major offensive in Luhansk, one of the two provinces that make up the Donbas. Moscow’s goal, having seized full control of the port city of Mariupol, in perhaps Moscow’s largest capture of the nearly three-month war, is to seize the remaining Ukrainian-held territory in the region and gain military momentum.

Control of Mariupol gives Russia control of a land route linking the Crimean peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014, with mainland Russia and parts of eastern Ukraine held by pro-Russian separatists.

Shelling and missile attacks hit Kharkiv in northern Ukraine and Mykolaiv and Zaporizhzhia in the south, while eight civilians were killed on the eastern front in Donbas, Ukrainian officials said.

Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman for Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, said Russian rockets hit a mobile anti-drone system near the Hannivka settlement, about 60 miles (100 km) northeast of the city of Mykolaiv.

On the Donetsk front, Russian forces were trying to break through Ukrainian defenses to reach the administrative borders of the Luhansk region, while further north they continued to shell Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, according to Ukraine’s general staff.

Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, its twin city across the Siverskiy Donets River, form the eastern part of a Ukrainian-controlled pocket that Russia has been trying to invade since mid-April after failing to capture kyiv and shifting its focus east. and south of the country.

Serhiy Haidai, governor of the Lugansk region, said that although Severodonetsk had been attacked from “four different directions”, Russian forces had failed to enter the city.

The Russian army razed the Black Sea port of Mariupol during its siege and subjected Ukrainian troops and towns in the east to relentless artillery and ground attacks.

“There is no work, no food, no water,” said Angela Kopytsa, 52, breaking down in tears as she spoke to AFP reporters on a Russia-organized tour in Mariupol. Kopytsa said that her home and her life had been destroyed during the fighting and that children in maternity wards were starving.

AFP, Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report