C T Online Desk: Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky made his first trip Sunday to the war-torn east since Moscow’s invasion started, as Russian forces tightened their grip around key cities in the Donbas region.
After visiting Kharkiv, Zelensky announced that he had fired the northeastern city’s security chief in a rare public rebuke.
Zelensky said that the man was dismissed ‘for not working to defend the city from the first days of the full-scale war, but thinking only of himself,’ and that while others had toiled ‘very effectively’, the former chief had not.
Although the president did not name the official, Ukrainian media reports identified him as Roman Dudin, the head of the Kharkiv region’s SBU security service.
Earlier, Zelensky’s office posted a video on Telegram of the president wearing a bullet-proof vest while viewing destroyed buildings in Kharkiv and its surroundings.
With the war devastating much of his country, the Ukrainian president is set to speak by video link Monday to European Union leaders in Brussels as they seek to break a deadlock on a Russian oil embargo.
Russia, since failing to capture the capital Kyiv in the early stages of the war and then retreating from the Kharkiv area, has shifted its focus to the eastern Donbas region.
Its forces said on Saturday they had captured the town of Lyman in the contested region and were upping the pressure on the twin cities of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk.
Zelensky has been based in Kyiv since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale attack on Ukraine.
‘In this war, the occupiers are trying to squeeze out at least some result,’ Zelensky said in a later Telegram post Sunday.
‘But they should have understood long ago that we will defend our land to the last man,’ he added.
While one-third of the Kharkiv region remained under Russian control, ‘We will for sure liberate the entire area,’ said Zelensky. ‘We are doing everything we can to contain this offensive.’
The situation in Lysychansk had become ‘significantly worse’, the regional governor of the Lugansk region, Sergiy Gaiday, said on Telegram.
‘A Russian shell fell on a residential building, a girl died and four people were hospitalised,’ he said.
On the other bank of the Donets river, Russian forces ‘carried out assault operations in the area of the city of Severodonetsk,’ according to the Ukrainian general staff.
Fighting in the city was advancing street by street, Gaiday said.
Zelensky, in his daily address, described a scene of devastation in Severodonetsk, saying, ‘All critical infrastructure has already been destroyed… More than two-thirds of the city’s housing stock has been completely destroyed.’
In the embattled city, where an estimated 15,000 civilians remain, a local official said ‘constant shelling’ made it increasingly difficult to get in or out.
‘Evacuation is very unsafe, it’s isolated cases when we manage to get people out. Now the priority is for the wounded and people who need serious medical assistance,’ said Oleksandr Stryuk, head of the city’s military and civil administration.
