DM Monitoring
MOSCOW: Russian officials on Thursday derided Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s wartime visit to the United States, claiming in several statements that his whirlwind trip to cement support in Washington proved he and his American allies weren’t “striving for peace” in Ukraine.
Zelenskyy received thunderous applause from members of Congress during a hastily organized trip on Wednesday, his first known trip outside Ukraine since Russian troops invaded the country on Feb. 24. Hours before the president’s arrival, the U.S. announced a new $1.8 billion military aid package.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned that providing Zelenskyy’s troops with more sophisticated weapons would not end the conflict, which has produced grinding though largely stalemated ground battles for territory and Russian air attacks on civilian power and water supplies.
Moscow did not hear “real calls for peace” during Zelenskyy’s U.S. visit and thinks Washington is determined to “de facto and indirectly fight with Russia to the last Ukrainian,” Peskov said. He also criticized Ukraine’s “barbaric shelling of residential buildings” in Russian-occupied areas of eastern Ukraine.
The Moscow-installed leader of Ukraine’s partially occupied Donetsk region reported that Ukrainian shelling of a hotel in the city of Donetsk killed two people and wounded several others Wednesday night, including a former Russian deputy prime minister.
On Thursday, a car bomb killed a Kremlin-appointed local official in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region, Russian state media reported. The casualties demonstrated the high stakes and fierce fighting as Russia and Ukrainian forces battle for control of four regions that Russian President Vladimir Putin illegally annexed in September. Zelenskyy landed in Poland on Thursday while traveling back to Ukraine, according to information he posted on social media.
He wrote that he met “a friend of Ukraine” on his way home. A video showed him being greeted by Polish officials after getting off an airplane.
