KYIV, UKRAINE — Russian forces on Friday struck the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro and pounded a key village in the southeast that Ukraine said it had recaptured in its grinding counteroffensive, while Moscow accused Kyiv of firing two missiles at southern Russia and wounding 20 people.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, meanwhile, marked Ukraine’s Statehood Day by reaffirming the country’s sovereignty — a rebuke to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who used his claim that Ukraine didn't exist as a nation to justify his invasion.
“Now, like more than a thousand years ago, our civilizational choice is unity with the world," Zelenskyy said in a speech on a square outside St. Michael's Monastery in Kyiv. “To be a power in world history. To have the right to its national history – of its people, its land, its state. And of our children – all future generations of the Ukrainian people. We will definitely win!”
He also honored servicemen and handed out first passports to young citizens as part of ceremonies. The holiday coincides with commemorations of the adoption of Christianity on lands that later became Ukraine, Russia and Belarus.
