Russia drives deeper into Donbas

Decide your own future, Pole urges Kyiv lawmakers

KYIV, Ukraine — Russia pressed its offensive in eastern Ukraine on Sunday as Poland’s president traveled to Kyiv to support the country’s European Union aspirations, becoming the first foreign leader to address the Ukrainian parliament since the start of the war.

Lawmakers gave a standing ovation to President Andrzej Duda, who thanked them for the honor of speaking where “the heart of a free, independent and democratic Ukraine beats.” Duda said that to end the conflict, Ukraine did not need to submit to conditions given by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Unfortunately, in Europe there have also been disturbing voices in recent times demanding that Ukraine yield to Putin’s demands,” he said. “I want to say clearly: Only Ukraine has the right to decide about its future. Only Ukraine has the right to decide for itself.”

Duda’s visit, his second to Kyiv since April, came as Russian and Ukrainian forces battled along a 342-mile wedge of the country’s eastern industrial heartland.

After declaring full control of a seaside steel plant that was the last defensive holdout in the port city of Mariupol, Russia launched artillery and missile attacks to expand the territory that Moscow-backed separatists have held since 2014 in the region known as the Donbas.

To bolster its defenses, Ukraine’s parliament voted Sunday to extend martial law and the mobilization of armed forces for a third time, until Aug. 23.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has stressed that the 27-member EU should expedite his country’s request to join the bloc. Ukraine’s potential candidacy is set to be discussed at a Brussels summit in late June.

France’s European Affairs minister Clement Beaune on Sunday told Radio J it

would be a “long time” before Ukraine gains EU membership, perhaps up to two decades.

“We have to be honest,” he said. “If you say Ukraine is going to join the EU in six months, or a year or two, you’re lying.”

But Poland is ramping up efforts to win over EU members who are more hesitant about accepting Ukraine into the bloc. Zelenskyy said Duda’s visit represented a “historic union” between Ukraine, which declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, and Poland, which ended communist rule two years earlier.

“This is really a historic opportunity not to lose such strong relations, built through blood, through Russian ag- gression,” Zelenskyy said. “All this not to lose our state, not to lose our people.”

Poland has welcomed millions of Ukrainian refugees and become a gateway for Western humanitarian aid and weapons into Ukraine. It is also a transit point for some foreign fighters who have volunteered to fight the Russian forces.

Duda credited the U.S. and President Joe Biden for unifying the West in supporting Ukraine and imposing sanctions against Moscow.

“Kyiv is the place from which one clearly sees that we need more America in Europe, both in the military and in this economic dimension,” said Duda, a right-wing populist leader.

On the battlefield, Russia appeared to have made slow, grinding moves forward in the Donbas in recent days. It intensified efforts to capture Sievierodonetsk, the main city under Ukrainian control in Luhansk province, which together with Donetsk province makes up the Donbas. The Ukrainian military said Sunday that Russian forces had mounted an unsuccessful attack on Oleksandrivka, a village outside Sievierodonetsk.

Sievierodonetsk came under heavy shelling, and Luhansk Gov. Serhii Haidai said the Russians were “simply intentionally trying to destroy the city … engaging in a scorched-earth approach.”

Haidai said Moscow was concentrating forces and weaponry there to try to win control of Luhansk, bringing in forces from Kharkiv to the northwest, Mariupol to the south, and from inside Russia.

The sole working hospital in the city has only three doctors and supplies for 10 days, he said.

Ukrainian officials have said little since the war began about the extent of their country’s casualties, but Zelenskyy said Sunday that 50 to 100 Ukrainian fighters were being killed, apparently each day, in the east.

In a general staff morning report, Russia said it was also preparing to resume its offensive on Slovyansk, a city in Donetsk province that saw fierce fighting last month after Moscow’s troops backed away from Kyiv.

In Enerhodar, a Russian-held city 174 miles northwest of Mariupol, an explosion Sunday injured the Moscow-appointed mayor at his residence, Ukrainian and Russian news agencies reported. Ukraine’s Unian news agency said a bomb planted by “local partisans” wounded 48-year-old Andrei Shevchuk, who lives near the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, Europe’s largest.

Mariupol Mayor Vadim Boychenko warned that the city faces a health and sanitation “catastrophe” from mass burials in shallow pits and the breakdown of sewage systems. An estimated 100,000 of the 450,000 people who lived in Mariupol before the war remain.

Ukrainian authorities have alleged Russian atrocities there, including the bombings of a maternity hospital and a theater where hundreds of civilians had taken cover.

Meanwhile, a Ukrainian court was expected to reach a verdict today for a Russian soldier who was the first to go on trial on a war crime allegation. The 21-year-old sergeant, who has admitted to shooting a Ukrainian man in the head in a village in the northeastern Sumy region on Feb. 28, could get life in prison if convicted.

Ukrainian Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova has said her office was prosecuting war crimes cases against 41 Russian soldiers for offenses that included bombing civilian infrastructure, killing civilians, rape and looting.

WAR AT HOME

In a rare joint television interview, Zelenskyy and first lady Olena Zelenska said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has “torn apart” their family as it has for millions of other households across the country.

Zelenska, who has two children with Ukraine’s president, admitted that she had barely seen Zelenskyy since Putin ordered troops into Ukraine. She said she and her husband have been mainly communicating by phone since then.

“Our family was torn apart, as every other Ukrainian family,” Zelenska said. “He lives at his job. We didn’t see him at all for 2½ months.”

Yet Zelenska was quick to dismiss the idea raised by one of the interviewers from the Ukrainian television network ICTV that the war had “basically taken her husband away.”

“Nobody takes my husband away from me, not even the war,” Zelenska replied.

The interview marked the second time the couple, who married in 2003, have appeared together since Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24. During the sit-down, Zelenska said she was “grateful” for their joint television appearance because it meant they could finally spend time together.

“A date on TV, thank you,” she joked. Zelenskyy nodded alongside her.

In the early days of the war, Zelenskyy said he was Russia’s “target No. 1” and that his family was “target No. 2.”

“They want to destroy Ukraine politically by destroying the head of state,” he told Ukrainians in a February address, although he refused to flee. Instead, Zelenskyy took to the streets of the capital, posting defiant videos on social media that earned him global praise, while his wife and children hunkered down in an undisclosed location for their safety.

During their interview, Zelenska said she remembers waking up to “weird noises” as Russia began its invasion and noticing that her husband was not by her side. Zelenskyy was already awake and in the next room, putting on a suit.

“It has started,” she remembers him telling her before he left — words she said left her in a state of “anxiety and stupor.”

Before becoming president three years ago, Zelenskyy was a comedian and actor who played the role of a president on screen. The 44-year-old also voiced Paddington Bear and, in 2006, won Ukraine’s version of “Dancing with the Stars.”

Zelenska, 44, is a screenwriter and has rarely been seen in public since Russia’s invasion. She was spotted for the first time earlier in May as Ukraine celebrated Mother’s Day, meeting in western Ukraine with U.S. first lady Jill Biden, who had crossed the border from Slovakia.

HEAT ON FACEBOOK

Meanwhile, a flood of posts pushing misinformation in Slovakia is putting the spotlight on Facebook for facilitating the spread of pro-Russian theories on the war in neighboring Ukraine, ranging from claims that Kyiv is secretly developing biological weapons to questioning whether Putin’s invasion even happened at all.

While Facebook owner Meta Platforms said it’s taking “extensive steps to fight the spread of misinformation” in the NATO and European Union member, Slovakia’s government, other former Eastern Bloc countries, and even U.S. lawmakers say the company isn’t doing enough.

The dispute took center stage last week when members of the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence called out Meta and its chief executive officer, Mark Zuckerberg, for facilitating the dangerous spread of pro-Russia disinformation in the country of 5.3 million.

According to the GLOBSEC security think tank, the intensity of false messages is worse here than anywhere else in ex-communist central Europe. That has buoyed support for Putin, with more than a quarter of Slovaks saying they back his actions, even as the administration in Bratislava tries to shelter the refugees and send weapons to Kyiv to aid in its defense.

“The Committee is deeply concerned by the continued presence of harmful disinformation and pro-Russian propaganda on Slovak Facebook,” the U.S. delegation led by Chairman Adam Schiff wrote in a letter to Zuckerberg. They urged Meta “immediately to ensure that all pro-Russian disinformation is quickly evaluated, factchecked, and labeled, downranked, or removed in accordance with Facebook’s public pledges and stated policies.”

The committee said that the U.S. and Slovak governments had repeatedly asked Meta to take action against messages that include posts accusing Ukrainians of supporting fascism, killing their fellow countrymen and demonizing the hundreds of thousands of people who have fled abroad to escape the war.

“Half of the population is prone to believe in some kind of misinformation or conspiracy theories,” said GLOBSEC analyst Dominika Hajdu.

At present, Meta has only one fact-checker dedicated to Slovakia, where about 2.7 million people, or almost half of the population, have Facebook accounts, making it the most widely used social-media platform, according to the U.S. committee members’ letter. They described the staffing level as “wildly inadequate.”

On a web page offered by Meta identifying fact-checking partners in Slovakia, it listed AFP journalist Robert Barca as the person responsible for Slovakia. Meta said it is consulting governments across the region, and its efforts to combat the issue include an array of measures that remove some content and tag other items with warning labels.