In a statement on Friday, Zelenskyy said Ukrainian forces had managed to halt a Russian offensive planned for March. The setback is now prompting Moscow to increase pressure across the battlefield.
‘Overall, the front line is holding. The situation is difficult, but the best in ten months,’ he said, citing Ukrainian and British intelligence assessments.
On the social network X, following a phone call with Pope Leo XIV, he wrote that ‘essentially, the Russians have only intensified their strikes, turning what should have been silence in the skies into an Easter escalation.’
He also said he had invited American negotiators to visit Kyiv and received a ‘positive response’, signalling continued diplomatic engagement with the United States.
Russia tests new tactics
Russia has carried out near round-the-clock air strikes on Ukraine since Thursday evening, the Ukrainian Air Force said on Friday. The bombardment is the second of the week and reflects an apparent shift in tactics, combining night-time drone attacks with renewed strikes during the day.
‘We see that the enemy is using new routes, new drones, which it is constantly upgrading, and new tactics,’ air force spokesman Yurii Ihnat said on state television. He added that Russia had launched more than 400 long-range drones and ten ballistic missiles over the past 24 hours, primarily targeting areas near the front line.
He said the pattern resembled Tuesday’s attack, in which a night-time barrage of more than 300 drones was followed by a similarly large daytime wave.
‘The enemy is putting pressure on our population, paralyzing the work of some public institutions as well as educational institutions,’ Ihnat said.
In the eastern Kharkiv region, rocket, bomb and drone strikes killed one person and injured 25 others over the same period.
Conflicting claims over Luhansk
On Wednesday, Russia’s defence ministry said its forces had taken full control of the Luhansk region in eastern Ukraine. The claim could not be independently verified. A Ukrainian military spokesman said there had been no significant changes along that section of the front for six months.
More than 99 per cent of Luhansk, one of the four Ukrainian regions annexed by Russia in 2022, has long been under Russian control. The annexation is rejected by Kyiv and most Western governments as illegal.
Luhansk and Donetsk together form the industrial Donbas region.
Kremlin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov reiterated this week that Ukrainian forces should withdraw from the parts of Donetsk still under Kyiv’s control, arguing that such a move could bring an end to the ‘hot phase’ of the war.
‘If the Ukrainian president were to take a decision to withdraw the troops, and if we then verify that he has withdrawn them, it would, of course, open up possibilities for resolving many issues, including the question of ending military actions,’ he said.
Russia’s defence ministry also claimed on Wednesday that its forces had taken the village of Verkhnya Pysarivka in the Kharkiv region and Boykivske in the Zaporizhzhia region. Those claims, too, could not be independently verified.
(reuters, max)