Zelensky Warns NATO Will Be Attacked Next as Russian Offensive Aims Westward

By Staff, Agencies

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned NATO Monday that its member states would soon be attacked by Russian forces after an air strike hit a Ukrainian military base close to the Polish border.

Meanwhile, the death toll in the strategic southern port city of Mariupol, facing acute deprivation amid a prolonged siege, has topped 2,000, officials there said.

While western Ukraine has largely been spared so far, Russian airstrikes overnight Saturday into Sunday carried the war deep into the west, killing 35 people and wounding 134 at a military base near Yavoriv, outside the city of Lviv – which is dangerously close to the frontier with EU and NATO member Poland.

“If you do not close our sky, it is only a matter of time before Russian missiles fall on your territory, on NATO territory, on the homes of NATO citizens,” Zelensky said in a video address released shortly after midnight, urging NATO to impose a no-fly zone over his country.

Washington and its EU allies have sent funds and military aid to Ukraine and imposed unprecedented economic sanctions on Russia.

Zelensky has continued to implore foreign counterparts to do more.

“Last year, I clearly warned NATO leaders that if there were no harsh preventive sanctions against the Russian Federation, it would go to war,” Zelensky said. “We were right.”

Further east, the latest fighting in Kiev’s suburbs left a US journalist dead – the first foreign reporter killed since Russia’s invasion of its neighbor on February 24.

“Kiev. A city under siege,” presidential advisor Mykhailo Podolyak wrote on Twitter. He said the city was preparing a “ruthless defense.”

Meanwhile, efforts continued to get help to Mariupol, which aid agencies say is facing a humanitarian catastrophe.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told ABC that Russia was “clearly, at least from an air strike perspective… broadening their target sets.”

Britain’s defense ministry said Saturday that Russian forces were about 25 kilometers [15 miles] from Kiev and that a column north of the city had dispersed as part of an apparent attempt to encircle it.

The UN estimates that almost 2.7 million people have fled Ukraine since the invasion, most of them to Poland, which is struggling to provide for the arrivals.