LVIV, Ukraine — Denouncing Russia’s “diabolic invasion” of its smaller neighbor, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv, both officials said Sunday, as fierce new fighting flared in the country’s east.
In a 10th week of warfare, Russia said Sunday it struck 800 targets overnight and early Sunday with missile and artillery fire, marking an intensified battle tempo along a crescent-shaped front line stretching 300 miles from southeast to northeast.
Moscow, which has signaled wider ambitions to seize the entirety of Ukraine’s southern Black Sea coast and render the country landlocked, confirmed it had taken aim a day earlier at the airport outside the major port city of Odesa. Ukrainian officials said earlier those strikes on Saturday left the airport inoperable.
Russia’s defense ministry routinely describes its targets as military ones, but at least two Ukrainian regional governors depicted the brunt of the latest carnage as falling on civilians.
Oleh Sinegubov, the governor of Kharkiv, where the country’s second-largest city is, on Sunday took to the Telegram messaging app to urge civilians to stay in shelters because shelling was so intense. Serhiy Haidai — head of the regional military administration in Luhansk, one of the two provinces making up the Donbas, the industrial heartland Russia covets — begged people to flee while they still could.
The United Nations, meanwhile, was attempting to broker a temporary cease-fire in the besieged port city of Mariupol, after a trickle of evacuees managed to emerge from a giant steel plant where hundreds of civilians are hunkered down amid some 2,000 Ukrainian fighters.
In Kyiv, Pelosi’s visit on Saturday evening marked the highest-level U.S. visit to the embattled country’s capital since the war began. Zelenskyy placed his hand on his heart as he greeted the speaker, who was accompanied by a congressional delegation.
In a video released by the Ukrainian president Sunday, Pelosi, clad in a bright blue pantsuit, could be seen walking outdoors among a phalanx of Ukrainian officials and armed guards.
Zelenskyy in recent weeks has received a parade of Western officials, including Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III a week ago. Pelosi is the next in line of succession to the presidency after Vice President Kamala Harris, making her the most senior U.S. official yet to make a wartime visit to Kyiv.
The Ukrainian capital was menaced in the war’s first weeks by heavy bombardment and an enormous column of Russian armored vehicles, but Moscow broke off the attack early last month and turned its attention to Ukraine’s south and east.
Russia on Sunday again struck a string of eastern Ukrainian cities and towns with shelling, and is massing troops and armor in preparation for what has been billed as a major offensive to seize the Donbas.
Zelenskyy, in his overnight address, accused the Kremlin of cynically preparing conscript soldiers as cannon fodder for the next phase of fighting in the east.
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“The Russian command is well aware that thousands more Russian soldiers will be killed and thousands more will be wounded in the coming weeks,” he said.
Summing up Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian invasion in numerical terms, Zelenskyy said that since Feb. 24, Ukrainian forces have destroyed an estimated 1,000 Russian tanks, 2,500 armored vehicles and nearly 200 aircraft. Some 2,300 Russian troops have been killed, he said. None of those figures could be independently confirmed.
Even after Russia broke off its effort to seize Kyiv, the capital has come under sporadic bombardment, including Russian strikes staged last week while United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was in the city to meet with Zelenskyy. That attack drew widespread international condemnation, and the Ukrainian president described it as intended to humiliate the world body.
For security reasons, Pelosi’s three-hour visit was not announced in advance. A week ago, Zelenskyy caught U.S. officials by surprise when he spoke publicly about the planned Blinken-Austin visit hours before it had taken place.
This time, Zelenskyy’s office posted the video of Pelosi’s visit online after she and the delegation had departed the country.
Pelosi tweeted afterward that the lawmakers were “honored” to have met Zelenskyy, who has won wide acclaim for his wartime leadership. Zelenskyy thanked Pelosi and the American people for supporting Ukraine, and she told him in turn that Ukraine’s battle was being waged on behalf of democracies everywhere.
“We are visiting you to say ‘thank you’ for your fight for freedom, that we’re on a frontier for freedom, and that your fight is a fight for everyone,” Pelosi, D-Calif., said. “And so our commitment is to be there for you until the fight is done.”
Joining Pelosi in Kyiv were Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who heads the House Intelligence Committee; Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee; Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass.; and Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo.
The delegation, which was holding talks with senior Polish officials including President Andrzej Duda, traveled Sunday to Rzeszow, in southeastern Poland. The country has been a main transit point for arms being shipped to Ukraine, and also has taken in the largest share of the more than 5.4 million people who have fled fighting in Ukraine.
Praising Poland’s role, Pelosi said Ukraine needed the West’s military, economic and humanitarian assistance to deal with the “devastating human toll taken on the Ukrainian people by (President Vladimir) Putin’s diabolic invasion.”
