Ukraine says Russia wants to split it in two

Russia wants to divide Ukraine into two parts, as happened with North and South Korea, Ukraine’s chief military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov said on Sunday.

He said the country would wage a fierce war to prevent a fragmentation of the country.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged the West to provide Ukraine with tanks, planes and missiles to help curb Russian forces, which the Kiev government said were increasingly targeting fuel and food depots.

After more than four weeks of conflict, Russia has failed to take control of any major Ukrainian cities, and Moscow signaled on Friday that it was reducing its ambitions to focus on securing the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, where separatists Russian-backed have fought with the Ukrainian army for the past eight years.

A local leader in the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic said Sunday that the region could soon hold a referendum on joining Russia, as happened in Crimea after Russia annexed the Ukrainian peninsula in 2014.