Ukraine’s counteroffensive against Russian forces has been “slower than desired”, but Ukrainian forces will not be pressured into speeding up, the country’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said, while Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow had observed a “lull” in Kyiv’s campaign.
Ukrainian forces are being slowed in their advance by vast minefields laid by Russian forces, Zelenskyy told to the United Kingdom’s BBC in an interview on Wednesday. With some 200,000 square kilometres (more than 77,000 square miles) of Ukrainian frontier territory littered with Russian land mines, the Ukrainian leader said that “at stake is people’s lives”.
