Ukraine: Russian forces in Ukraine appear to have shifted their focus from a ground offensive aimed at Kyiv to instead prioritising what Moscow calls the liberation of the contested Donbas region, suggesting a new phase of the war that is now in its 31st day. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday again appealed to Russia to negotiate an end to the war, but he said Ukraine would not agree to give up any of its territories for the sake of peace.
About 300 people were killed in the Russian airstrike last week on a Mariupol theatre that was being used as a shelter, Ukrainian authorities said Friday in what would make it the war’s deadliest known attack on civilians yet. The United Nations said it had confirmed 1,081 civilian deaths and 1,707 injuries in Ukraine since the February 24th invasion, adding that the real toll was likely higher. Russia’s army has put its official losses in Ukraine to date at 1,351 soldiers. Atleast 136 children have been killed and 199 others wounded since the war began, the Prosecutor General’s Office in Ukraine claimed. In Kyiv Oblast alone, 64 children have been either killed or injured.
Meanwhile, The United States and other countries are accelerating their transfer of arms and supplies to Ukraine as Russian forces claimed to have destroyed Ukraine’s largest remaining military fuel storage site in a Kalibr cruise missile strike on Friday. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov in Warsaw, Poland to discuss the Russian invasion. US President Joe Biden is expected to “drop by” the meeting.