Russia has signalled it may dial back its war aims to focus on eastern Ukraine after failing to break the nation's resistance in a month of fighting and attacks on civilians, including up to 300 feared killed in the bombing of a theatre.
The possible shift came ahead of a planned meeting by United States President Joe Biden with Ukrainian refugees in Poland and talks with his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda in Warsaw before he gives a speech on the "brutal war", the White House said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered the February invasion to destroy Ukraine's military and topple pro-Western President Volodymyr Zelensky, bringing the country under Russia's sway.
But Sergei Rudskoi, a senior general, suggested a considerably reduced "main goal" of controlling Donbas, an eastern region already partly held by Russian proxies.
His surprise statement came as a Western official reported that a seventh Russian general, Lieutenant General Yakov Rezanstev, had died in Ukraine and that a colonel had been "deliberately" killed by his own demoralised men.
Complicating Moscow's challenges, invasion troops were facing a counteroffensive in Kherson, the only major Ukrainian city under Russian control.
Visiting Rzeszow, about 80 kilometres from Ukraine, Mr Biden praised Ukraine's "incredible" resistance, comparing the conflict to a bigger version of communist China's 1989 crushing of protests in Tiananmen Square.
Mr Biden told soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division that the struggle in eastern Europe represents a historic "inflection point".
"Are democracies going to prevail... or are autocracies going to prevail? And that's really what's at stake," Biden said.
The US leader was briefed on the humanitarian situation, with more than 3.7 million refugees fleeing Ukraine, most of them into Poland.
A man rides a bicycle as black smoke rises from a fuel storage of the Ukrainian army following a Russian attack, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, on Friday, 25 March, 2022. Source: AP / Rodrigo Abd
The plan is part of a sea change in the West, which for years has shrunk from direct confrontation with the Kremlin, but now seeks to make Mr Putin a pariah.
Kherson now 'contested' city, Pentagon says
Ukrainian forces launched a counter-offensive in Kherson, the country's only major city seized by Russian troops, and it is once again "contested," a senior US defence official said Friday.
"The Ukrainians are trying to take Kherson back, and we would argue that Kherson is actually contested territory again," the Pentagon official told reporters.
"We can't corroborate exactly who is in control of Kherson but the point is, it doesn't appear to be as solidly in Russian control as it was before," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
If the Ukrainian forces manage to regain control of the strategic city located at the mouth of the Dnieper, Russian troops around Mikolaiv would be "sandwiched" between Ukrainian forces defending Mikolaiv and those in Kherson, the official said.
"That would that would make it very, very difficult for them to make any kind of ground movement on Odesa," the main seaport still held by the Ukrainians.
"That would be a significant development, no question about that, in terms of the southern part of the war," he said.
The Pentagon said there was also "very heavy fighting" to the northwest of the capital Kyiv where "the Ukrainians are trying hard to dislodge the Russians from Bucha and Irpin."
Russia is meanwhile mobilizing forces from separatist territories of Georgia to deploy in Ukraine, the official said.
"We've seen our first indications that they are trying to send in some reinforcements from Georgia," the senior official told reporters.
Following a flashpoint conflict with Georgia in 2008, Russia recognized the independence of two pro-Russian Georgian separatist regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia and established military bases there.
'Children' written clearly
Russia's far bigger military continued to combat determined Ukrainian defenders using Western-supplied weapons, from near the capital Kyiv to Kharkiv, the Donbas region and the devastated southern port city of Mariupol.
Authorities said they fear some 300 civilians in Mariupol may have died in a Russian air strike on a theatre being used as a bomb shelter last week. The theatre was targeted despite the word "children" being written in large Russian letters on the ground outside, so as to be visible to pilots.
Russian forces hammering Mariupol's out-gunned defenders consider the city a lynchpin in their attempt to create a land corridor between the Crimea region Moscow already seized in 2014 and the Donbas.
Leaving behind a home that has become a hellscape, Osksana Vynokurova, 33, counted the cost.
"I have escaped, but I have lost all my family. I have lost my house. I am desperate," she told news agency AFP after escaping Mariupol by train to the western city of Lviv.
"My mum is dead. I left my mother in the yard like a dog, because everybody's shooting."
Shelling damage in a residential area in the city of Mariupol, Ukraine, on 25 March, 2022. Source: AAP / TASS/Sipa USA
"I have never seen such horror. There is no Mariupol," the middle-aged woman added, comparing her city to Grozny, the capital of Chechnya that Russian forces obliterated during wars in the 1990s. "Everything is destroyed."
Eastern focus
Russia's army was predicted by some to roll across Ukraine with little resistance. However, Mr Putin's military has been beset by many of the same problems plaguing its ranks as far back as the Chechen wars — poor discipline and morale, faulty equipment and tactics, and brutality toward civilians.
Amid heavy censorship, Russian authorities on Friday gave only their second official military death toll since the start, at 1,351. This is far below Western estimates, with one senior NATO official saying between 7,000 and 15,000 Russian soldiers have died.
Mr Rudskoi's announcement of a pivot to the battle for eastern Ukraine was accompanied by claims of success.
He said Ukraine's military has been severely degraded and that the reason Russia had not seized cities was to "prevent destruction and minimize losses among personnel and civilians."
Residents carrying groceries walk away from a building that was just hit by Russian bombardment, and caught on fire, in the Moskovskyi district in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Friday, 25 March 25, 2022. Source: Getty / Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times
However, Ukrainians are mounting an increasingly aggressive defence and in places even taking back ground.
Britain's defence ministry said Ukrainian counter-attacks, and Russian forces falling back on overextended supply lines, had allowed Ukraine to "re-occupy towns and defensive positions up to 35 kilometres east of Kyiv."
Chemical weapons warning
As the Russian war machine stumbles, Western officials are warning Mr Putin could resort to more extreme measures, including chemical weapons.
In Brussels on Thursday for NATO, EU and G7 summits, Biden said the NATO alliance, would "respond" if Putin does use chemical warfare — though his National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan later stressed the United States itself "has no intention of using chemical weapons, period, under any circumstance".
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov accused Mr Biden of seeking to "divert attention."
Mr Putin, whom Mr Biden again branded a "war criminal," gave a speech Friday saying that Russia was the victim, comparing Western boycotts to "Nazis in Germany."
