Summary
- Ukraine intelligence chief predicts guerrilla warfare
- Zelenskiy appeals for more Western military hardware
- Biden says Putin ‘cannot remain in power’
- Russia-backed region signals possible referendum
Russia wants to split Ukraine into two, as happened with North and South Korea, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief said on Sunday, vowing “total” guerrilla warfare to prevent a carve-up of the country.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged the West to give Ukraine tanks, planes and missiles to help fend off the Russian forces, which the Kyiv government said were increasingly targeting fuel and food depots.
U.S. officials continued efforts to soften comments on Saturday from U.S. President Joe Biden, who said in a fiery speech in Poland that Russian leader Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power”.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Washington had no strategy of regime change in Moscow and that Biden had simply meant Putin could not be “empowered to wage war” against Ukraine or anywhere else.
After more than four weeks of conflict, Russia has failed to seize any major Ukrainian city and Moscow signalled on Friday it was scaling back its ambitions to focus on securing the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting the Ukrainian army for the past eight years.
A local leader in the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic said on Sunday the region could soon hold a referendum on joining Russia, just as happened in Crimea after Russia seized the Ukrainian peninsula in 2014.
Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to break with Ukraine and join Russia — a vote that much of the world refused to recognise.
“In fact, it is an attempt to create North and South Korea in Ukraine,” Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukrainian military intelligence, said in a statement, referring to the division of Korea after World War Two.
He predicted Ukraine’s army would push back Russian forces.
“In addition, the season of a total Ukrainian guerrilla safari will soon begin. Then there will be one relevant scenario left for the Russians, how to survive,” he said.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry spokesperson also dismissed talk of any referendum in eastern Ukraine.
“All fake referendums in the temporarily occupied territories are null and void and will have no legal validity,”Oleg Nikolenko told Reuters.
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- Comparison Between Ukraine and Russia’s militaries
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