Russia wants to split Ukraine into two
Russia wants to split Ukraine into two, as happened with North and South Korea, Ukraine's military intelligence chief said yesterday, vowing "total" guerrilla warfare to prevent a carve up of the country.
President Volodymyr Zelensky urged the West to give Ukraine tanks, planes and missiles to help fend off the Russian forces, which the Kyiv government said were increasingly targeting fuel and food depots.
Meanwhile, US officials continued efforts to soften comments on Saturday from US President Joe Biden, who said in a fiery speech in Poland that Russian leader Vladimir Putin "cannot remain in power".
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Washington had no strategy of regime change in Moscow, telling reporters in Jerusalem that Biden had simply meant Putin could not be "empowered to wage war" against Ukraine or anyone else.
After more than four weeks of conflict, Russia has failed to seize any major Ukrainian city and Moscow signalled on Friday it was scaling back its ambitions to focus on securing the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting the Ukrainian army for the past eight years.
A local leader in the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic said yesterday the region could soon hold a referendum on joining Russia, just as happened in Crimea after Russia seized the Ukrainian peninsula in 2014.
Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to break with Ukraine and join Russia -- a vote that much of the world refused to recognise.
"In fact, it is an attempt to create North and South Korea in Ukraine," Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukrainian military intelligence, said in a statement, referring to the division of Korea after World War Two.
Ukraine's foreign ministry spokesperson also dismissed talk of any referendum in eastern Ukraine.
Kyiv and Moscow, meanwhile, agreed two more "humanitarian corridors" to evacuate civilians from frontline areas yesterday, including allowing people to leave by private car from the southern city of Mariupol, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said.
The encircled port of Mariupol has been devastated by weeks of heavy bombardment, forcing thousands of residents to take shelter in basements with scarce water, food, medicine or power, reports Reuters.
In a late-night television address on Saturday, Zelensky demanded that Western nations hand over military hardware that was "gathering dust" in stockpiles, saying his nation needed just 1% of Nato's aircraft and 1% of its tanks.
The United Nations has confirmed 1,104 civilian deaths and 1,754 injuries across Ukraine but said the real toll is likely to be higher. Ukraine said yesterday 139 children had been killed and more than 205 wounded so far in the conflict.
The British Ministry of Defence said Russian forces appeared to be concentrating their efforts on encircling Ukrainian troops directly facing separatist regions in the east.
"The battlefield across northern Ukraine remains largely static with local Ukrainian counterattacks hampering Russian attempts to reorganise their forces," the ministry said.
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