Zelensky Fires Kharkiv Security Chief For “Not Working To Protect The City”

Volodymyr Zelensky speaks to servicemen during his visit to the Kharkiv region.

Kharkiv:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made his first trip on Sunday to the war-torn east since Moscow’s invasion began, as Russian forces tightened their siege around the cities important in the Donbas region.

After visiting Kharkiv, Zelensky announced that he had fired the northeastern city’s security police chief in a rare public rebuke.

Zelensky said the man was fired “for not working to protect the city from the first days of all-out war, but thinking only of himself”, and that while others have work “very efficiently”, the former leader does not.

Although the president did not name the official, Ukrainian media identified him as Roman Dudin, the head of the SBU security service of the Kharkiv region.

Earlier, Zelensky’s office posted a video on Telegram of the president wearing a bulletproof vest while watching destroyed buildings in Kharkiv and the surrounding area.

With the war ravaging much of his country, Ukraine’s President will speak by video link on Monday with European Union leaders in Brussels as they seek to break the deadlock over the oil embargo. Russian mines.

Pressure on the east

Russia, since failing to capture the capital Kyiv in the early stages of the war and then retreating from the Kharkiv region, has shifted its focus to the eastern Donbas region.

Their forces said on Saturday they had captured the disputed area town of Lyman and were increasing pressure on the twin cities of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk.

Zelensky has been stationed in Kyiv since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an all-out assault on Ukraine.

“In this war, the occupiers are trying to get at least some outcome,” Zelensky said in a later Telegram post on Sunday.

“But they should have understood long ago that we would defend our land for the last man,” he added.

While a third of the Kharkiv region remains under Russian control, “We will definitely liberate the entire region,” Zelensky said. “We’re doing everything we can to stop this attack.”

‘Continuous shelling’

The governor of the Lugansk region, Sergiy Gaiday, said on Telegram that the situation in Lysychansk had become “significantly worse”.

He said: “A Russian shell hit a residential building, one girl died and four people were hospitalized.

On the other side of the Donets River, Russian forces “conducted offensive operations in the area of ​​​​the city of Severodonetsk”, according to the Ukrainian general staff.

Gaiday said that fighting in the city is happening one by one.

Zelensky, in his daily speech, described the devastation in Severodonetsk, saying, “All vital infrastructure was destroyed… More than two-thirds of the city’s housing stock was completely destroyed.”

In the crowded city, which is home to an estimated 15,000 civilians, a local official said “constant shelling” made it increasingly difficult to get in and out.

Oleksandr Stryuk, head of the city’s military and civilian administration, said: “It’s very unsafe to evacuate, those are isolated cases when we try to get people out. Now the priority first for the injured and those in need of serious medical assistance.”

Water supplies are also increasingly unstable, and residents have gone more than two weeks without a mobile phone connection, he added.

On Sunday, the Russian Defense Ministry said it had destroyed an arsenal of the Ukrainian armed forces in the southeastern city of Kryvyi Rih with “long-range high-precision missiles”.

Russian forces also targeted a Ukrainian air defense system near Mykolaivka in the Donetsk region, as well as a radar station near Kharkiv and five ammunition depots, one near Severodonetsk.

‘New face’

During a trip to Kharkiv, Zelensky discussed reconstruction plans with local officials, saying there was a chance that areas ravaged by Russian attacks would “gain a new look”.

According to local officials, more than 2,000 apartment buildings were destroyed in whole or in part by Russian shelling in the area.

It was in Kharkiv that customers returned to the popular Crystal Cafe in central park after it reopened at the end of April.

Residents drop by for coffee, a bite to eat, or a taste of “Biloshka” ice cream, a Crystal specialty that vendors have been serving since the 1960s.

“We need to maintain jobs. The city is slowly coming back,” the cafe’s manager, Alyona Kostrova, 36, told AFP.

The menu has been cut back due to supply issues and the locality is operating with staff numbers down, from 30 or 40 people before the war to seven or eight.

Far from the city center in the Saltivska neighborhood, where Russian shells continued to fall, the atmosphere was different.

“I don’t want to say that people are buying a lot. People have no money,” said Vitaly Kozlov, 41, a local egg, meat and vegetable hawker.

Volodymyr Svidlo, 82, told AFP he had “no pension” and came to the neighborhood “once a week” to sell items, such as onions, dill and flowers from his garden for a living.

Urgent Summit

When Zelensky talks to EU leaders at their emergency summit on Monday, he will press them to “kill Russian exports” as he seeks to put international pressure on Moscow.

A new round of European sanctions has been organized by Hungary, whose Prime Minister Viktor Orban has close ties to Russia’s Putin.

The landlocked country is heavily dependent on Russian crude oil supplied through the Druzhba pipeline.

Hungary has asked the EU fund to spend at least four years and 800 million euros ($860 million) to tweak its refineries and increase pipeline capacity for alternative suppliers, such as Croatia.

But according to a new proposal presented to national negotiators on Sunday, the Druzhba pipeline could be excluded from the sanctions package, which targets only oil being transported to the EU by tanker.

(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from an aggregated feed.)