Ukraine has pleaded with Western countries for faster deliveries of weapons as Russian forces pound the east of the country.
Live Briefing: Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine
RFE/RL’s Live Briefing gives you all of the major developments on Russia’s invasion, how Kyiv is fighting back, the plight of civilians, and Western reaction. For all of RFE/RL’s coverage of the war, click here.
Ukrainian troops “are doing everything to stop the offensive, as much as they possibly can, as long as there are enough heavy weapons, modern artillery — all that we have asked for and continue to ask for from our partners,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address on June 10.
Zelenskiy said “very difficult battles” were ongoing, including in the eastern Donbas region where Moscow has concentrated its firepower.
Zelenskiy said Russia wants to destroy every city in the Donbas.
“Every city, that’s not an exaggeration. Like Volnovakha, like Mariupol. All of these ruins of once-happy cities, the black traces of fires, the craters from explosions — this is all that Russia can give to its neighbors, to Europe, to the world.”
The fiercest fighting remains around the eastern industrial town of Syevyerodonetsk, a small city that has become the focus of Russia’s advance in eastern Ukraine.
Britain’s Ministry of Defense said in its daily intelligence bulletin on June 11 that the Russians had not made advances into the south of the city.
“Intense street to street fighting is ongoing and both sides are likely suffering high numbers of casualties,” the ministry said in an intelligence update posted on Twitter.
The update said Russian bombers have likely been launching 1960s-era heavy, anti-ship missiles meant to destroy aircraft carriers with nuclear warheads against land targets in Ukraine. It added that Russia is likely using such weapons because it is running short of more precise modern missiles.
Also on June 11, the Ukrainian Army said that Russian forces were regrouping to launch an offensive on the city of Slovyansk in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.
In its regular operational update, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said Moscow managed to get a foothold overnight in the village of Bohorodychne, 24 kilometers northwest of Slovyansk, and was preparing to attack the city.
The war in the east is now primarily an artillery battle in which Kyiv is severely outgunned, Ukrainian officials say.
“This is an artillery war now,” Vadym Skibitsky, Ukraine’s deputy head of military intelligence, told The Guardian.
“Everything now depends on what [the West] gives us. Ukraine has one artillery piece to 10 to 15 Russian artillery pieces.”
Germany, among the largest suppliers of weapons since Russia invaded but criticized for being slow to supply the heavy weaponry Kyiv says it needs, plans to revise its rules on arms exports to make it easier to arm democracies like Ukraine, Der Spiegel reported on June 10.
Ukraine also asked for humanitarian support to combat an outbreak of dysentery and cholera in the port city of Mariupol, which has been reduced to ruins.
Mayor Vadym Boychenko told national television that sanitation systems were broken and corpses were rotting in the streets.
“Unfortunately…these infection outbreaks will claim thousands more Mariupolites,” Boychenko said.
The office of Ukraine’s prosecutor-general said on June 11 that it has learned about the deaths of 24 more children in Mariupol as the result of shelling by Russian forces.
In total, the office said that at least 287 children have died since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24. More than 492 have been wounded, according to the tally.
“These figures are not final, as work is under way to establish them in places of active hostilities, in the temporarily occupied and liberated territories,” the prosecutor’s office said on the Telegram messaging app.
Meanwhile, on June 11, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin reinforced Washington’s commitment to the region in light of Russia’s unprovoked war on Ukraine.
“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is what happens when oppressors trample the rules that protect us all,” Austin told an Asian security forum in Singapore. “It’s a preview of a possible world of chaos and turmoil that none of us would want to live in.”
Speaking remotely at the same summit, Zelenskiy said the outcome of the war in his country affected not just Ukraine, but the future of the international order.
“I am grateful for your support…but this support is not only for Ukraine, but for you as well,” he told participants in the Shangri-La Dialogue. “It is on the battlefields of Ukraine that the future rules of this world are being decided along with the boundaries of the possible.”
