As battles rage, Ukraine rejects Macron plea not to ‘humiliate’ Russia

As Ukrainian troops tried to claw back territory and stave off a blistering Russian assault along the country’s embattled eastern front, the government Saturday sought also to repel a demand earlier in the day by President Emmanuel Macron of France that Moscow not be humiliated to improve chances of reaching a diplomatic solution.

“We must not humiliate Russia so that the day when the fighting stops we can build an exit ramp through diplomatic means,” Macron, who has sought to position himself as the world’s chief negotiator with the Kremlin, said in an interview with French newspapers. “I am convinced that it is France’s role to be a mediating power.”

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba responded with a scathing post on social media.

“Calls to avoid humiliation of Russia can only humiliate France and every other country that would call for it,” Kuleba wrote. Instead, he argued, peace and the saving of lives could best be achieved by Russia being “put in its place.”

The exchange comes as the war has settled into what seems increasingly destined to be a slog.

The Ukrainians and Russians both said Saturday that they were inflicting decisive losses against each other in the battle for Sievierodonetsk, the last major city in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine still under Ukrainian control.

But the fighting was not limited to that town. A senior Ukrainian official said Saturday that the country’s troops had reached a milestone in grinding down the Russian invasion force in eastern Ukraine. Andriy Yermak, chief of staff to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, posted on social networking site Telegram that most of a large Russian military unit had been destroyed in heavy fighting over the past weeks.

“Almost the entire 35th all-Russian army was destroyed,” he wrote.

Yermak’s claim was supported by commentary from a Russian military blogger cited in a report by the influential Institute for the Study of War. Incompetent Russian commanders had failed to prepare troops for combat in a forested area near the city of Izyum, the report said.

The claim of the routing of the Russian unit could not be independently verified.

Ukrainian soldiers interviewed over the past week have described fierce fighting in the forests around Izyum, a strategic city that Russia is using as a base for attacks south toward the cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. Ukrainian forces are also taking heavy losses, 60 to 100 fatalities a day, Zelenskyy said recently.

The British Defense Ministry said Saturday that Russia’s recent use of airstrikes and artillery fire has been a factor in its limited success in Ukraine’s east, a contrast with its largely ineffective air attacks earlier in the war. The Russian reliance on long-range strikes has probably depleted the country’s stock of precision-guided missiles, leading to more use of unguided munitions that can cause substantial civilian casualties, the ministry said.