NEVER SURRENDER
MAD Vlad’s Army are the barbarians at the gates of Europe, with Ukraine teetering on the brink of survival, President Volodymyr Zelensky said yesterday.
He saluted the incredible courage of troops holding back the Kremlin monster’s superpower forces against all odds.
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He was buoyed by intelligence saying Putin’s frontline units were three days from running out of vital supplies - with 10,000 Russian soldiers dead in a month.
Brave Ukrainians were already launching counter-attacks last night in a drive to retake territory.
Civilians in the south-western port city of Odessa staged firing drills and dug themselves in with sandbags and tank traps.
However US President Joe Biden warned Putin’s “back is against the wall” - and he could strike back with chemical weapons.
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He said Putin has made false claims that Ukraine is stockpiling chemical and biological weapons.
He went on: “That’s a clear sign he’s considering using both of those.
"He’s already used chemical weapons in the past, and we should be careful of what’s about to come.”
Meanwhile, Mr Zelensky, in a stirring video address to Italy’s parliament, begged The West to step up sanctions to put more pressure on his ruthless foe.
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The president said: “For Russian troops, Ukraine is the gates of Europe, where they want to break in - but barbarism must not be allowed to pass. We are on the brink of survival.”
He called for face-to-face talks with Putin and said it was “already understood” Ukraine could not join Nato, as the tyrant has demanded.
But Ukraine “would have to be destroyed” before he handed over any land, he vowed, and he would never surrender.
He spoke movingly of how Putin’s savagery had cost the lives of at least 117 innocent children since the invasion began a month ago.
Russian forces were also last night said to have abducted 2,389 Ukrainian orphans whose parents had been murdered.
Mr Zelensky said: “There are Russian troops who are killing and raping people and kidnapping children.”
Ukraine’s prosecutor general Iryna Venediktova appealed for help.
She said: “By destroying homes and killing the parents, the Russian Federation deprives Ukrainian children of parental care and puts their lives in further jeopardy in Russia. We call on the international community to respond.”
Military experts also predicted bogged-down Russian frontline forces were about to run out of fuel and supplies - enabling Ukraine to go on the offensive.
Russians are being shipped away from the frontline with frostbite after being denied proper winter gear, US sources said last night.
Intelligence officials said they were being dogged by fuel, ammunition and food shortages.
Russia was reported to have lost nearly 10,000 troops since its disastrous invasion of Ukraine, according to pro-Kremlin sources who blundered by releasing the figure.
Putin newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda quoted stats from Russia’s defence ministry showing 9,861 and 16,153 wounded in the first three weeks of the conflict.
But the story was quickly deleted from its website and replaced with another - minus casualty figures.
'GATES OF EUROPE'
Russia has so far admitted just 498 deaths of troops and a further 1,597 wounded.
Ukraine claim Russia has lost 15,000 men, the same number killed during 10 years of its disastrous Afghanistan campaign in the 1980s.
Analysts say Putin has spread his largely conscripted forces too thinly by attacking from the north, south and east.
Failure to set up a fuel pipeline could leave his tanks and military vehicles at the mercy of Ukrainians armed with British and US shoulder-launched missiles.
Offensives in the cities of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy and Kharkiv were said to “have endured yet another day of limited progress with most forces largely stalled”.
Ukrainian forces claimed to have retaken Makariv on the outskirts of Kyiv last night and blocked a key highway to stop it being encircled.
But the fightback was driving Russian forces to fight even dirtier, raining rocket, missile and bomb barrages on besieged civilian areas.
Latest targets included a psychiatric hospital in Mykolaiv early yesterday, close to where a military barracks was blitzed on Friday.
The strangled southern port of Mariupol descended further into living hell yesterday as fighting continued with 300,000 starving locals left without water or power.
Russian warships in the Sea of Azov continued shelling yesterday.
Officials rejected calls for surrender, claiming Russian promises of safe passage for refugees could not be trusted.
One woman told how children are slowly dying. Victoria, who only gave her first name, said: “It is the 21st century, and children are dying from dehydration in my city, they are starving.”
Councillor Professor Mykola Trofymenko, who fled last week with his family, told how a doctor performed surgery with a kitchen knife and no anaesthetic at a hospital.
Mr Trofymenko said: “We tried to build Europe in Mariupol - before February 24 it was beautiful.
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“But it doesn’t exist now because almost everything is destroyed.”
The number of Ukrainians fleeing has topped 3.5 million, the UN said, with two million-plus in Poland.
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