Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Saturday that counter-offensive and defensive actions are underway against Russian forces, asserting that his top commanders are in a “positive” mindset as their troops are engaged in intense fighting along the front line.
The Ukrainian leader, at a Kyiv news conference alongside Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, responded to a question about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s comment a day earlier that Ukraine’s counter-offensive had started — and Ukrainian forces were taking “significant losses.”Zelennsky said that “the counter-offensive, defensive actions are taking place in Ukraine. I will not speak about which stage or phase they are in.”
Trudeau, the first foreign leader to visit Ukraine since devastating floods caused by a breach in a Dnieper River dam, offered up monetary, military and moral support.
He pledged 500 million Canadian dollars ($375 million) in new military aid, on top of more than 8 billion Canadian dollars ($6 billion) that Canada has already provided since the war began in February 2022, and announced 10 million Canadian dollars ($7.5 million) for humanitarian assistance for the flood response.Trudeau said the dam’s collapse was “a direct consequence of Russia’s war,” but he didn’t blame Moscow directly.Top Ukrainian authorities have stopped short of announcing a full-blown counteroffensive was underway, though some Western analysts have said fiercer fighting and reported use of reserve troops suggests it was.
Recent Western injections of billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment — some of it high-tech and top-of-the-line — to Ukraine has raised expectations about when it would be used, and to what effect against dug-in Russian lines.
For months, Ukrainian commanders in the eastern city of Bakhmut — which was largely devastated in a months-long fight that has been one of the bloodiest battles of the war — have used the language of counteroffensive and defensive operations to describe the activity there.Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said Friday that the epicenter of the fighting has been in the east, particularly in the Donetsk region, and cited “heavy battles” in Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Marinka.The operator of At the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, Europe’s largest, which is occupied by Russian forces, its announced the cold shutdown on Thursday of the last of its five out of six reactors were already in a state of cold shutdown. That’s a process in which all control rods are inserted into the reactor core to stop the nuclear fission reaction and generation of heat and pressure.
Energoatom, the Ukrainian nuclear agency, said in a statement late Friday that there was “no direct threat” to the Zaporizhzhia plant due to the breach of the Kakhovka dam further down the Dnieper River.Energoatom said it shut down the final reactor because of the lower water level and because of shelling near the site that has damaged overhead lines connecting the plant to Ukraine’s energy system. Also on Saturday morning, Ukrainian authorities reported that at least four civilians have died across the country as Russian forces launched Iranian-made.
