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Volodymyr Zelenskyy has cancelled his upcoming visits abroad as Ukraine’s military leadership races to thwart Russia’s new offensive.
The Ukrainian president “has instructed that all international events involving him scheduled for the coming days be postponed and new dates co-ordinated,” his press secretary Serhiy Nykyforov said on Wednesday.
Russia opened a new front last week in the north-eastern Kharkiv region with the aim of stretching Ukrainian forces, which are already struggling because of recruitment issues and delays to the delivery of US military aid.
Russian forces have occupied around 110 sq km of territory, forcing Ukraine to urgently dispatch reinforcements while simultaneously fending off a bigger offensive in the eastern Donetsk region.
Zelenskyy’s announcement indicates the increasing concern in Kyiv over the latest Russian attacks. In his address on Tuesday evening, he said the situation was “difficult”, particularly in Donetsk and Kharkiv, but “under control”.
“Our warriors are destroying the occupier who is trying to advance. It is all quite tense,” adding that all contested areas where Russia is carrying out large-scale offensives have been “reinforced”.
While the Russians’ advance south of the border village of Pylna appears to have slowed, maps published on Wednesday by Ukrainian open-source intelligence group Deepstate showed they had made further encroachments into Vovchansk and had occupied an area in the west of the town.
Oleksii Kharkivskyi, head of the police force in Vovchansk, said in a video posted to Facebook on Wednesday that police-led evacuations of the remaining civilians continued as Russian soldiers took up positions in the town.
Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, has discussed the possibility of Russia opening an additional front in Sumy. The region, west of Kharkiv, has suffered a huge surge in shelling in the past week.
On the defence of the Kharkiv region, he said the reinforcements were stabilising the frontline and the situation was currently “not catastrophic”.
However, Budanov and other Ukrainian military officials have previously suggested that Kyiv lacked the reserves to resist the latest offensive in the Kharkiv region because of its need to repel Russian advances in Donetsk.
On a visit to Kyiv on Tuesday, US secretary of state Antony Blinken appeared to express a shift in Washington’s view on Ukraine using American weapons in strikes on Russian territory.
Speaking next to Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba, Blinken said: “We have not encouraged or enabled strikes outside of Ukraine, but ultimately Ukraine needs to make decisions for itself on how it conducts this war . . . and we will continue to back Ukraine with the equipment it needs to win”
The US Congress passed a new package including $61bn of military aid for Ukraine last month.
The issues of attacks on Russian territory has been a thorn in US-Ukraine relationship since Ukraine began regular attacks on infrastructure such as oil depots at the beginning of the year.
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