KRAMATORSK, Ukraine — With fighting raging in the eastern and southern parts of the country, Ukrainians marked a somber Orthodox Easter on Sunday ahead of a planned visit by the most senior U.S. officials to arrive in the capital since the war erupted two months ago.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he expected to meet later Sunday with U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III to plead for swift supplies of additional weapons. The Biden administration has sent or committed $3.4 billion in armaments for Ukraine during the war, including two $800 million packages in the last 10 days that contained heavier materiel such as artillery, howitzers, tactical drones and combat helicopters.
Zelenskyy said the weaponry was increasingly vital as Russia appears to be expanding its war goal to seize the entire southern coast of Ukraine in addition to the eastern Donbas region.
As the mournful wail of sirens echoed through the emptied-out cities and towns of Ukraine’s east, Russian troops along a boomerang-shaped, 300-mile-long front line continued a fierce artillery barrage across Donetsk and Luhansk, the two provinces that make up the Donbas region, according to the Ukraine military’s general staff.
It added that Russia pressed on with its assault of the Azovstal steelworks plant — where the last of Ukrainian defenders in the southern city of Mariupol remain bunkered — and that it also had deployed Iskander-M mobile battlefield missile launchers some 40 miles from the Ukrainian border as part of an ongoing shelling campaign in the northeastern city of Kharkiv.
Senior presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said Russian forces were “continuously attacking” the steel mill in Mariupol with bombs and artillery. Speaking on Twitter early Sunday, he pleaded for an Easter cease-fire, humanitarian escape corridors for civilians and a “special round of negotiations” to exchange military prisoners. Moscow has rejected all the demands, Ukrainian officials said.
Entering a third month, the invasion is spurring the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II with some 4.7 million fleeing the country and 6.5 internally displaced, according to the U.N. However, Russian troops are failing to make significant territorial gains because of a robust defense, Western officials say.
“Poor Russian morale and limited time to reconstitute, re-equip and reorganize forces from prior offensives are likely hindering Russian combat effectiveness,” the British Defense Ministry’s intelligence assessment said on Sunday.
A visit by Blinken and Austin would follow a stream of European leaders who have already made what has amounted to a pilgrimage of sorts to Kyiv after the withdrawal of Russian forces from the area. Several countries are also reestablishing their diplomatic missions in the capital — the latest being Britain — after having left ahead of the war. The Biden administration will be under pressure to follow suit. U.S. diplomats initially relocated to the western Ukrainian city of Lviv and then pulled out altogether to Poland.
Zelenskyy said he “expected specific things and specific weapons” when world leaders come, adding that he had seen an increase in both the amount and the speed of arms deliveries.
“They should not come here with empty hands,” he said, adding that Ukraine should not be used as a prop for “tragic selfies.” “We will return all our land the moment we receive necessary arms.”
In Kramatorsk, one of the prime targets in Russia’s new phase of the assault, only a few dozen residents attended Easter midnight Mass at the Syvato-Troyitskyy church, a reflection of the tense, fearful atmosphere engulfing the city as the battles edge ever closer. Approximately three-quarters of the city’s population has been evacuated.
“Of course people are afraid to go out, but it’s my responsibility to be here in the church, to remain close to God,” said Sergei Kapitonenko, a 44-year-old priest in Kramatorsk.
Easter is the most sacred holiday on the Orthodox Christian calendar but was marked this year at cemeteries, in the ruins of bombed churches and with prayers for the dead, the missing, the trapped and those fighting.
“We’re praying that God gives us quiet, and will kick out evil from the hearts of people, and give them understanding and forgiveness in their heart,” Kapitonenko said.
With services concluded, a few people came to the church to deliver baskets of colored Easter eggs and traditional Easter cakes decorated with sprinkles and icing as an offering to the needy. Two worshipers walked through the church’s ornate inner chamber, lighting a candle before silently departing.
For Kapitonenko, a kindly-looking man sporting a long beard inflected with a few strands of white, the last two months of the war had been “almost like a movie.”
“It’s unreal for me. It’s hard to understand what’s happening, that it could be like this,” he said.
Still, he chose to stay. The situation was still relatively quiet in Kramatorsk, he explained, and as long as the possibility was there to stay, he would.
“The people still here, they’re the children of the church,” he said. “And the father cannot leave them and run away elsewhere.”
Zelenskyy issued an Easter message to his people. Speaking from the gold-domed St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, he noted the majestic house of worship survived invasions and occupations through the centuries and still stood strong — an analogy he made to the nation.
“We are enduring dark times,” Zelenskyy said, but added: “Today we all believe in a new victory for Ukraine. And we are all convinced that we will not be destroyed by any horde or evil.”
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(Bulos reported from Kramatorsk and Wilkinson from Washington. Los Angeles Times staff writer Carolyn Cole contributed to this report from Dnipro, Ukraine.)
