BRUSSELS/LVIV/MARIUPOL, Ukraine – Western leaders meeting in Brussels on Thursday will agree to strengthen their forces in Eastern Europe and increase military aid to Ukraine as the Russian assault on its neighbor entered its second month.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged them to go further and repeated his call for a no-fly zone over his country, where thousands of people have been killed, millions become refugees, and cities pulverized since Russian President Vladimir Putin unleashed his invasion on Feb. 24.
UNICEF said on Thursday that more than half of Ukrainian children had now been driven from their homes.
In Mariupol, the besieged southern port that has come to symbolize Ukraine’s plight, people were burying their dead. In a part of the city now captured by Russians, a patch of grass between charred hulks of blasted apartment buildings had become a makeshift graveyard, with freshly-dug mounds marked with plastic flowers and crosses made from broken window frames. The thud of explosions could be heard in the distance.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been hiding in basements in Mariupol with no running water, food, medicine or power. Ukrainian officials accused Russia on Thursday of having forcibly deported 15,000 people from the city to Russia. Moscow denies this.
In a month of fighting, Ukraine has fended off what many Western military analysts had anticipated would be a quick Russian victory. So far Russia has failed to capture a single major city. Its armored columns have barely moved in weeks, besieging cities in the east and stalled at the gates of Kyiv, taking heavy casualties and running low on supplies.
Ukrainian officials say they are shifting now onto the offensive in much of the country. On Thursday they said their forces had destroyed the “Orsk,” a large Russian landing ship near the Russian-occupied port of Berdyansk on the Azov Sea.
“Yes, it’s destroyed,” Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar told a video briefing. The ship was capable of carrying 45 armored personnel carriers and 400 people, she said.
Video footage, which Reuters was able to confirm was filmed from the shore inside Berdyansk, showed a column of smoke rising up from a blaze beside a dock in the port, and the flash of an explosion. Russian officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In a sign of Western unity, leaders gathered in Brussels for a day of emergency summits of NATO, the G7 and the EU.
“We must ensure that the decision to invade a sovereign independent country is understood to be a strategic failure that carries with it ruinous costs for Putin and Russia,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told the EU parliament.
US President Joe Biden, rallying allies on his first trip aboard since the war began, will unveil new sanctions. The first US shipment from a new, $800 million arms package for Ukraine will start flying out in the next day or so, a US defense official said.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance would boost its forces in Eastern Europe by deploying four new battle groups in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia.
