Ukraine’s Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar has said that the center of the fighting has shifted to the road to Mariupol where the Ukrainian offensive is slowly pushing back Russian forces, as reported by The Guardian. The minister has also said that the British Challenger tanks are geared up to join the battle. Maliar claimed that the most active fighting was no longer around the eastern Donetsk region Bakhmut, but in the south and especially towards the two coastal cities of Berdiansk and Mariupol.
“If in the first week the epicentre was the east, now we see that the fighting is moving to the south and now we see the most active areas are Berdiansk and Mariupol,” Maliar said, as quoted by The Guardian. “In the east, the enemy has turned on all the forces to stop our offensive. And they are massing forces there to stop us. In the south they are not very successful,” she added.
The minister said, “there is progress on all southern directions, and there are several of them.” Talking about the losses, Mailer said that nine times more Russians were killed than Ukrainians in the Bakhmut sector, as reported by The Guardian. The movement towards Mariupol is still incremental, with the front said to have been pushed back by about a kilometer. She further said that Ukraine didn't have huge losses, but since this is a war, there are losses.
Ukrainian Prez Zelensky Rules Out Talks With Russia
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky ruled out talks with Russia on Friday as he met with a delegation of African leaders. "I clearly said several times at our meeting that to allow any negotiations with Russia now that the occupier is on our land is to freeze the war, to freeze pain and suffering," Zelensky told reporters, as quoted by the news agency AFP. This comes after he met several leaders including South Africa's Cyril Ramaphosa. The delegation is slated to hold a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday.
According to AFP, the delegation of leaders arrived in Kyiv on a mission to broker peace. They first visited the nearby town of Bucha, where Russian troops have been accused of massacring civilians. Following the arrival of the delegation, air raid sirens sounded across Ukraine on Friday morning and the air force claimed it had downed 12 Russian missiles.
Zelensky said that Russia's missile strike on Kyiv as the African delegation visited meant that Putin did not control Russia's army or that he was "irrational", adding he wanted to "fully destroy the state of Ukraine."
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