Ukrainian servicemen walk in the forest near a recently retaken village, north of Kharkiv. Photo / AP
Almost three months after Russia shocked the world by invading Ukraine, its military faces a bogged-down war, the prospect of a bigger Nato and an opponent buoyed by wins on and off the battlefield.
Top diplomats from Nato met in Berlin with the alliance's chief and declared that the war "is not going as Moscow had planned".
"Ukraine can win this war," Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said, adding that the alliance must continue to offer military support to Kyiv. He spoke by video link to the meeting as he recovers from a Covid-19 infection.
On the diplomatic front, both Finland and Sweden took steps bringing them closer to Nato membership despite Russian objections. Finland announced that it was seeking to join Nato, citing how the invasion had changed Europe's security landscape. Sweden's governing party also endorsed the country's own bid for membership, which could lead to an application in days.
If the two nonaligned Nordic nations become part of the alliance, it would represent an affront to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has cited Nato's post-Cold War expansion in Eastern Europe as a threat to Russia. Nato says it is a purely defensive alliance.
While Moscow lost ground on the diplomatic front, Russian forces also failed to make territorial gains in eastern Ukraine.
Ukraine said it held off Russian offensives in the east, and Western military officials said the campaign Moscow launched there after its forces failed to seize the capital of Kyiv has slowed to a snail's pace.
Ukraine, meanwhile, celebrated a morale-boosting victory in the Eurovision Song Contest. The folk-rap ensemble Kalush Orchestra won the glitzy pan-European competition with its song Stefania, which has become a popular anthem among Ukrainians during the war.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy vowed that his nation would claim the customary winner's honour of hosting the next annual competition.
"Step by step, we are forcing the occupiers to leave the Ukrainian land," Zelenskyy said.
The band's frontman, Oleh Psiuk, said at a news conference Sunday that the musicians were "ready to fight" when they return home. Ukraine's government prohibits men between 18 and 60 from leaving the country, but the all-male band's six members received special permission to go to Italy to represent Ukraine in the contest.
They will return to a country still fighting for survival.
Russian and Ukrainian fighters are engaged in a grinding battle for the country's eastern industrial heartland, the Donbas. Ukraine's most experienced and best-equipped soldiers have fought Moscow-backed separatists in the east for eight years.
Even with its setbacks, Russia continues to inflict death and destruction across Ukraine. Over the weekend, its forces hit a chemical plant and 11 high-rise buildings in Severodonetsk, in the Donbas, the regional governor said. Governor Serhii Haidaii said two people were killed in the shelling and warned residents still in the city to stay in underground shelters.
Russian missiles destroyed "military infrastructure facilities" in the Yavoriv district of western Ukraine, near the border with Poland, the governor of the Lviv region said.
Lviv is a major gateway for the Western-supplied weapons Ukraine has acquired during the war.
The Ukrainian military said it held off a renewed Russian offensive in the Dontesk area of the Donbas. Russian troops also tried to advance near the eastern city of Izyum, but Ukrainian forces stopped them, the governor of Ukraine's Kharkiv region, Oleh Sinegubov, reported.
The Ukrainian claims could not be independently verified, but Western officials also painted a sombre picture for Russia.
Britain's Defence Ministry said in its daily intelligence update that the Russian army had lost up to one-third of the combat strength it committed to Ukraine in late February and was failing to gain any substantial territory.
"Under the current conditions, Russia is unlikely to dramatically accelerate its rate of advance over the next 30 days," the ministry said on Twitter.
The assessments of Russia's war performance came as Russian troops retreated from around Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, which was a key military objective earlier in the war and was bombarded for weeks. The regional governor said there had been no shelling in the city for several days, though Russia continued to strike the wider Kharkiv region.
One Ukrainian battalion that had been fighting in the region reached the border with Russia on Sunday and made a victorious video there addressed to Zelenskyy.
In the video posted on Facebook by Ukraine's Ministry of Defence, a dozen fighters stood around a blue-and-yellow post, Ukraine's colours.
One explained that the unit went "to the dividing line with the Russian Federation, the occupying country. Mr President, we have reached it. We are here."
While he spoke, other fighters made victory signs and raised their fists.
After failing to capture Kyiv, Putin shifted the invasion's focus to the Donbas, aiming to seize territory not already occupied by the Moscow-backed separatists.
In the southern Donbas, the Azov Sea port of Mariupol is now largely under Russian control, except for a few hundred Ukrainian troops who have refused to surrender and remain holed up in the Azovstal steel factory.
Many of their wives called on the global community to secure the release of "the entire garrison" during an online news conference. The women painted a grim picture of the troops' situation, saying they suffered severe food, water and medicine shortages; untreated injuries were sometimes leading to sepsis.
The Ukrainian prosecutor-general's office said regional prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation into Moscow's alleged use of restricted incendiary bombs at the steelworks. International law allows certain use of incendiary munitions but bars their use to directly target enemy personnel or civilians.
Turkey's presidential spokesman, Ibrahim Kalin, said the country had offered to evacuate wounded Ukrainian soldiers and civilians by ship from Azovstal, according to official state broadcaster TRT.
The invasion of Ukraine has other countries along Russia's flank worried they could be next, including Finland, which shares both a 1340km land border and the Gulf of Finland with Russia. Putin told Finnish President Sauli Niinisto in a phone call that joining Nato would be an "error".
In neighbouring Sweden, after the ruling Social Democratic Party backed plans to join Nato, the plan was set to be discussed in parliament, with an announcement by the Cabinet to follow.
However, Nato operates by consensus, and the Nordic nations' potential bids were thrown into question over concerns from Turkey. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said he had discussed Turkey's concerns at the Nato meeting, especially Sweden and Finland's alleged support for Kurdish rebel groups and their restrictions on weapons sales to Turkey.
But during a visit to Sweden, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said Finland and Sweden would be "important additions" to Nato and that the US should swiftly ratify their membership. McConnell is leading a delegation of GOP senators to the region. They made a surprise visit to Kyiv on Saturday in a show of support.
- AP
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