Visiting the front lines in the east and south one after another… Building morale and demonstrating resistance
Open schedule to find Kharkiv and Mikolaiu who fought fiercely
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on the 18th (local time) that he would retake southern Ukraine, which had been occupied by Russian forces.
President Zelensky emphasized in a video speech released shortly after his visit to Mykolaiw, in southern Mikolaiwu, which had been severely damaged by the war, that “we will not give the southern part to anyone”, dpa news agency reported.
In his speech, he vowed to retake territories occupied by Russian forces, saying, “We will take back everything that belongs to us.”
He also said he would do everything he could to resume food exports through southern ports.
President Zelensky’s visit to Mykolayu on this day is interpreted as a strategy to show the will of the Ukrainian army to resist.
In a video released by the Office of the President of Ukraine, President Zelensky looked around buildings in a residential area in Mikolayu.
At the end of March, he also visited a state government building where 37 people were killed in a missile attack by the Russian army.
President Zelensky congratulated Mayor Oleksandr Senkevich, Goryeo-born Governor Vitali Kim, and the soldiers who had defended the city for their courage in the face of the Russian military offensive, and awarded medals to the hard work of the medical staff at the municipal hospital.
It was Zelensky’s first visit to Mykolayu since the Russian invasion on February 24.
As a strategically important city connected to the Black Sea, the city has been one of the main targets of Russian forces since the start of the war.
Russian forces advanced to the outskirts of Mykolayu in early March, but then retreated after being counterattacked by Ukrainian forces.
In the early days of the war, President Zelensky, who rarely left the capital, Kiiu, was trying to stabilize the shock of the war, but recently he has been holding public events closer to the front line.
At the end of last month, I visited Kharkiv, the second city in northeastern Ukraine.
It was not long after they escaped the Russian attack.
The New York Times (NYT) reported that President Zelensky’s move was interpreted as an attempt to show that the Ukrainian military is taking the lead in the region and to boost the morale of the military.
The New York Times added that, especially in the eastern Donbas region, with the increasing sacrifice of its own forces, the NYT is also trying to divert attention at home and abroad to places where the military has had some success.
Apart from President Zelensky’s efforts to shift the focus to the ‘achievements’ of his own military, Russian bombing continues in various places, including the eastern Donbas region.
The US think-tank Institute for Warfare (ISW) reported that Russian forces were continuing their attacks on the Mykolayu-Kherson border.
This was intended to deter further expansion of the Ukrainian counterattack, ISW explained.
Casualties in the eastern Donbas region continue to pour in.
The burials of the frontline dead are held daily in many parts of Ukraine, the New York Times reported.
Even in Lviv, a western city that is geographically far from Russia and considered to be relatively safe, the cemetery is out of its maximum capacity as the bodies of the dead have flooded in, the New York Times added.
/yunhap news
