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Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky gestures as he speaks to media during a joint press conference with the Polish President and Lithuanian Prime Minister following their meeting in Kyiv on Saturday. (AFP)
President Volodymyr Zelensky touted a newly developed Ukrainian “drone missile” on Saturday that he said would take the war back to Russia and scornfully derided Russia’s Vladimir Putin as a “sick old man from Red Square”.
As Ukraine marked 33 years of post-Soviet independence, Zelensky said the new weapon, Palianytsia, was faster and more powerful than the domestically made drones that Kyiv has so far used to fight back against Russia, striking its oil refineries and military airfields.
“Our enemy will…know what the Ukrainian way for retaliation is. Worthy, symmetrical, long-ranged,” he said.
Zelensky said the new class of Ukrainian weapon had been used for a successful strike on a target in Russia, but did not say where.
He used derisive language to describe Russia’s 71-year-old president and the nuclear rhetoric coming out of Moscow.
“A sick old man from Red Square who constantly threatens everyone with the red button will not dictate any of his red lines to us,” he said in a video on the Telegram messaging app.
Russia, which has attacked Ukraine with many thousands of missiles and drones since it invaded in February 2022, has decried Ukraine’s drone attacks as terrorism. Moscow’s troops are advancing in Ukraine’s east and occupy 18% of the country.
Zelensky has been pressing Kyiv’s allies to allow him to use Western weapons deeper in Russian territory such as to strike airbases used by Russian warplanes that pound Ukraine with missiles and glide bombs.
“I want to stress once more that our new weapon decisions, including Palianytsia, is our realistic way to act while some of our partners are unfortunately delaying decisions,” Zelensky told a news conference.
Ukrainians say the word “Palianytsia”, a type of Ukrainian bread, is too difficult to pronounce for Russians and it has been used — sometimes humorously — during the war as a way to tell Ukrainians and Russians apart.
“It will be very difficult for Russia, difficult to even pronounce what exactly has hit it,” Zelensky said of the drone missile.
In a decree, Zelensky promoted his top commander, Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi, to the rank of general, a tacit gesture of praise after Ukraine’s lightning cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region launched on August 6.
Slammed by Russia as an escalation and major provocation, Ukraine’s incursion has captured more than 90 settlements in the Kursk region according to Kyiv, the biggest invasion of Russia since World War Two.
Speaking at a joint news conference with Poland’s and Lithuania’s leaders, Zelensky told reporters the operation had in part been a preventive move to stop Russian plans to capture the northern city of Sumy.
Apart from capturing prisoners of war and creating a “buffer zone”, Zelensky said the operation had other objectives that he could not disclose publicly.
Polish president Andrzej Duda confirmed that Polish PT-91 Twardy tanks given to Kyiv by Warsaw were taking part in the fighting in Kursk region.
“We are touched to see how the PT-91 Twardy tanks, given by Poland (to Ukraine) more than one year ago, are defending today Ukraine on the battlefields, fighting in the Kursk region,” he said.
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