KRAMATORSK, Ukraine — Russian and Ukrainian troops faced off Saturday along a 300-mile battlefront in the country’s east, where Ukraine said it beat back numerous attacks but faced renewed shelling in the crippled city of Mariupol, the Black Sea port of Odesa and beyond.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, meanwhile, said that two senior U.S. officials — Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and the Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III — would arrive Sunday in the capital, Kyiv, in what would be the highest-level delegation dispatched by President Joe Biden since the war began two months ago.
Several other world leaders have made the trip in recent weeks to meet with Zelenskyy, ramping up pressure on Washington to follow suit. Neither the Pentagon nor the State Department publicly confirmed the trip.
