Russia carried out its widest array of missile strikes against Ukraine in more than two weeks Monday, pounding cities across the country in an apparent attempt to destroy Ukrainian weapons stocks before launching a much anticipated new ground offensive aimed at cleaving off a coastal stretch of the country’s east.
The Russian Defense Ministry claimed to have taken out 16 Ukrainian military facilities with the strikes, even hitting targets in the far western city of Lviv, which had previously been spared attacks in Russia‘s nearly two-month-old war that appears now to be headed into a violent new chapter.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in a nationwide address Monday evening from Kyiv, acknowledged that perhaps the critical battle of the war was on in earnest, and said his outnumbered forces would not back down.
“No matter how many Russian troops are driven there, we will fight,” he said. “We will defend ourselves. We will do it every day.”
The Ukrainian military General Staff confirmed Monday that Russian forces had “stepped up offensive and assault operations in several directions in the east of Ukraine. Russia continues to form additional military units in occupied Crimea and in the bordering Rostov oblast.”
But Ukrainian troops continued Monday to hold off Russian forces besieging the southern port city of Mariupol, a linchpin in what is widely seen to be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s revised war plan to try and militarily control a land bridge between Russia and Ukraine‘s Crimean Peninsula that Moscow seized eight years ago.
After facing unexpectedly fierce resistance from Ukrainian forces in the north and around the capital city of Kyiv, Russian troops and artillery withdrew from the war-torn country’s central region and mass in the east and south for what intelligence sources predict will be a major offensive in the Donbas. Russia‘s evolving war plan took another major hit last week when two Ukrainian-made missiles helped sink the Moskva, the flagship of the Russian fleet stationed just off the Ukrainian coast in the Black Sea.
Analysts say the emerging fight over Ukraine’s mostly Russian-speaking industrial heartland is likely to be no less bloody than what unfolded in early April — a period marred by allegations of Russian forces carrying out mass atrocities against Ukrainian civilians in areas near Kyiv. The fight now centers around a battle lines that were first laid out when pro-Russia separatists seized an enclave of territory in the Donbas in 2014, sparking a low-grade but deadly civil war.
“Both sides are preparing for a historic battle for Ukraine’s east, the Donbas,” according to Iulia-Sabina Joja, a Europe expert with the U.S.-based Middle East Institute. She predicted that the outcome will be “largely decided by how quickly the West manages to ship heavy weapons to Ukrainian forces on the front lines.”
“For weeks now the Ukrainian leadership has been begging its Western partners for heavy weapons, which would give Kyiv a chance to win this battle,” Ms. Joja wrote in an analysis circulated Monday.
“But Western leadership remains hesitant and divided, with countries’ responses ranging from significant and resolute support from the U.K. to a refusal to even ship weapons by Hungary,” she wrote, adding that European decision-making over arming Ukraine has been “slowed” by elections in several key NATO member nations, including Hungary and France, as well as in Serbia.
“After Hungary and Serbia’s recent elections were won by allies of Vladimir Putin, the second round of France’s presidential elections next Sunday will determine whether the West will remain united in support of Ukraine (if [incumbent President] Emmanuel Macron wins) or the regional security architecture will fall apart (if Putin ally Marine Le Pen wins),” Ms. Joja wrote.
Mr. Macron, France’s incumbent, is in a tight runoff against Ms. Le Pen, a right-wing populist with a history of warm relations with Mr. Putin. In an interview Monday with French public radio, she said she sided with Kyiv in the current fighting but favored renewing closer ties with Russia after the war, arguing it was needed to keep Moscow from aligning with China.
Russia has strongly complained about the increasing flow of Western weapons to Ukraine. On Russian state media, some anchors have charged that the supplies amount to direct Western engagement in the fight against Russia.
Russian forces claimed Monday to be specifically targeting arms depots holding European and American weaponry brought into Ukraine to support the Ukrainian military. The Russian Defense Ministry claimed a logistics center storing foreign-made weapons was hit during the strikes on Lviv, where at least seven people were reported killed.
Plumes of black smoke rose over a city, which is situated about 40 miles from the Ukraine-Poland border and has been a haven for civilians fleeing fighting across other parts of Ukraine. The Associated Press on Monday described Lviv as a major gateway for NATO-supplied weapons and foreign fighters joining the Ukrainian cause.
The region’s governor, Makysm Kozytskyy, said Monday that the Russian missile strikes on Lviv had hit three military infrastructure facilities and an auto mechanic shop. He said the wounded included a child.
A Washington Times reporter in Lviv last month described a city whose citizens had mobilized to make everything from camouflage netting to Molotov cocktails that would be shipped to the Ukrainian forces on the front lines in the eastern half of the country.
Lviv has also been seen as a relatively safe place for the elderly, mothers and children trying to escape the war. A hotel sheltering Ukrainians who had fled fighting in other parts of the country was among the buildings badly damaged Monday, according to Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi.
“The nightmare of war has caught up with us even in Lviv,” Lyudmila Turchak, who fled with two children from the eastern city of Kharkiv, told The Associated Press. “There is no longer anywhere in Ukraine where we can feel safe.”
Holding out in Mariupol
In other developments, a few thousand Ukrainian troops, by Russia’s estimate, remained holed up at a mammoth steel mill in Mariupol, the last known pocket of resistance in the devastated southern port city after seven weeks of bombardment. The holdouts ignored a surrender ultimatum from the Russians on Sunday.
The Associated Press reported that Russian forces have begun dropping so-called “bunker bombs” on the steel mill to end the Ukrainian resistance. A significant portion of Russia‘s invading force has been tied up in recent weeks trying to secure control of the strategic port, even as hundreds of thousands of city residents have tried to flee the fighting.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, in an interview Monday with CNN, acknowledged the damage that Russian forces had inflicted on Mariupol, but said the fall of the city — which would be the first major urban area to fall to the invaders after nearly eight weeks of fighting — is not inevitable.
“The Ukrainians continue to fight for Mariupol,” Mr. Kirby said. “It is an important city for them economically, culturally, and they are still in the city fighting for it.”
And Mr. Zelenskyy revealed he had submitted a filled-out questionnaire in the first step toward obtaining accelerated membership in the European Union — a desire that has been a source of irritation to Russia for years. Mr. Zelenskyy, though, has offered to drop any effort to join NATO, one of the Kremlin’s key demands before the invasion, in return to ironclad security guarantees from world powers.
The Biden administration, meanwhile, continued Monday with efforts to rally Western and Eastern European allies behind Ukraine.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken “underscored the importance of transatlantic unity in the face of the Kremlin’s brutal war against Ukraine” during a phone call with Romanian Foreign Minister Bogdan Aurescu, according to a State Department spokesman Ned Price.
“The secretary emphasized the need for NATO Allies to continue to work tirelessly to support Ukraine’s efforts to defend against Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified aggression,” Mr. Price said in a statement, adding that Mr. Blinken thanked Mr. Aurescu for “Romania’s tremendous welcoming of nearly 700,000 refugees from Ukraine.”
The State Department separately announced that Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman will travel to Brussels later this week, leading a U.S. delegation at the third High Level Meeting of the U.S.-EU Dialogue on China. Her trip will also include meetings “with NATO and EU leaders on the war and ways to punish Russia for its invasion.
In addition to the strikes on Lviv Monday, Russian missiles also rocked Vasylkiv, a town south of Kyiv that is home to a military air base, according to residents. It was not immediately clear what was struck. Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, was also hit by shelling that killed at least three people, according to Associated Press journalists on the scene. One of the dead was a woman who appeared to be going out to collect water in the rain. She was found lying with a water canister and an umbrella by her side.
Gen. Richard Dannatt, a former head of the British Army, told Sky News that Russia is waging a “softening-up” campaign ahead of the Donbas offensive.
A senior U.S. defense official, briefing reporters on background, said there are now 76 Russian combat units, known as battalion tactical groups, in eastern and southern Ukraine, up from 65 last week.
That could translate to around 50,000 to 60,000 troops, based on what the Pentagon said at the start of the war was the typical unit strength of 700 to 800 soldiers, but the numbers are difficult to pinpoint at this stage in the fighting.
The official also said that four U.S. cargo flights arrived in Europe on Sunday with an initial delivery of weapons and other materials for Ukraine as part of a $800 million package announced by Washington last week. And training of Ukrainian personnel on U.S. 155-mm howitzers is set to begin in the next several days.
Although pressed by Mr. Zelenskyy to come to Kyiv, President Biden and the White House were giving no signs Monday that he was planning the trip in the near future.
“What our focus continues to be on is providing Ukraine … a historic amount of security assistance,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told CNN in another interview. “We would not outline from here or anywhere from the government, who, if, and when” a top U.S. official would be making the trip.
• Joseph Clark contributed to this article, which is based in part on wire service reports.