(This is an update to an earlier story headlined: “Ukraine’s defense minister: The war is entering a new protracted phase, heavy weaponry will be key.”)
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Russia's losses in the war against Ukraine are increasing and its prospects for victory are diminishing.
Zelenskyy made his remarks Friday evening in a presidential video address, Ukrainskaya Pravda reported.
Zelenskyy summed up what Ukraine claims are Russian losses in the war that began on Feb. 24.
"Today we can report on the 200th downed Russian military aircraft. Russia has not lost so many aircraft in any war in decades."
"And Russia has lost almost 27,000 soldiers, many of them young conscripts."
"Russia has lost over 3,000 tanks, armored combat vehicles, a large number of conventional military vehicles, helicopters, drones and all its prospects as a state."
"Why all this? For a monument to Lenin to stand in the temporarily occupied Henichesk for a little longer? There is no other result for Russia and there will not be any."
Zelenskyy was referring to a statue of former Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin that was erected in the Russian-occupied town of Henichesk which sits on the Sea of Azov in Kherson province, just north of the border with Russian-annexed Crimea. The original Lenin statue was taken down by order of the city council in 2015.
Zelenskyy said the Ukrainian military has been pushing out invading Russian forces throughout eastern and southern Ukraine — a total of 1,015 settlements since the war gegan, including six in the past 24 hours.
"We are doing everything we can to liberate our land quickly. This is our priority," Zelenskyy added. That depends not only on Ukrainian fighters, but also on all “the countries in the whole free world.”
Earlier Friday, Ukraine’s Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said the war with Russia is entering a new protracted phase that will last until the Ukrainian defenders receive a critical amount of heavy weaponry from their Western partners.
Reznikov made his remarks in a Facebook post in which he offered his assessment of “what happened in the last 78 days of the war that started over eight years ago.”