Ukraine ruled out a ceasefire or any territorial concessions to Russia, and Poland's president said any loss of Ukrainian territory would be a "huge blow" to the entire West as he warned against appeasing Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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Russia has stepped up its pounding of the Donbas and Mykolaiv regions with airstrikes and artillery fire, in what Ukraine has described as a "scorched-earth" strategy to win control of the eastern front.
"The war must end with the complete restoration of Ukraine's territorial integrity and sovereignty," Andriy Yermak, Ukraine's presidential chief of staff, said in a Twitter post on Sunday.
Polish President Andrzej Duda offered Warsaw's backing, telling lawmakers in Kyiv on Sunday that the international community had to demand Russia's complete withdrawal and that sacrificing any territory would be a "huge blow" to the entire West.
"Worrying voices have appeared, saying that Ukraine should give in to Putin's demands," Duda said, the first foreign leader to address the Ukrainian parliament in person since Russia's Feb. 24 invasion.
"Only Ukraine has the right to decide about its future."
Ukraine and Poland agreed to establish a joint border customs control and work on a shared railway company to ease the movement of people and increase Ukraine's exports.
Most Ukrainian refugees have crossed to the European Union through border points in Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania. Poland has granted the right to live and work and claim social security payments to over 3 million Ukrainians.
Ukraine, one of the world's major exporters of wheat and corn, has been unable to export nearly 25 million tons of grains, causing global food prices to soar.
Speaking to the same parliamentary session, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy renewed a plea for stronger economic sanctions against Moscow.
"Half-measures should not be used when aggression should be stopped," he said.
Zelenskyy said at a news conference with Duda that 50 to 100 Ukrainians are dying every day on the war's eastern front in what appeared to be a reference to military casualties.
Russia is waging a major offensive in Luhansk, one of two provinces in Donbas, after ending weeks of resistance by the last Ukrainian fighters in the strategic southeastern port of Mariupol.
The heaviest fighting focused around the twin cities of Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, Ukrainian Interior Ministry adviser Vadym Denysenko told Ukrainian television on Sunday.
The cities form the eastern part of a Ukrainian-held pocket that Russia has been trying to overrun since mid-April, when it shifted focus to the south and east after abandoning an attempt to take Kyiv.
Serhiy Gaidai, the governor of Luhansk, said in a local television interview that Russia was "wiping Sievierodonetsk from the face of the earth."
Russia's Defense Ministry said on Sunday its forces pummeled Ukrainian command centers, troops, and ammunition depots in Donbas and the Mykolaiv region in the south with airstrikes and artillery.
Russian-backed separatists already controlled parts of Luhansk and neighboring Donetsk before the invasion, but Moscow wants to seize the remaining Ukrainian-held territory in the region.
Ukraine's military said seven civilians were killed and eight injured during Russian attacks in Donbas on Sunday. Numbers for Luhansk were not disclosed.
After declaring full control of a sprawling seaside steel plant that was the last defensive holdout in the port city of Mariupol, Russia launched artillery and missile attacks to expand the territory that Moscow-backed separatists have held since 2014 in the region known as the Donbas.
To bolster its defenses, Ukraine's parliament voted Sunday to extend martial law and the mobilization of armed forces for a third time, until Aug. 23.
On the battlefield, Russia appeared to have made slow, grinding advances in the Donbas in recent days. It intensified efforts to capture Sievierodonetsk, the main city under Ukrainian control in Luhansk province, which together with Donetsk province makes up the Donbas. The Ukrainian military said Sunday that Russian forces had mounted an unsuccessful attack on Oleksandrivka, a village outside of Sievierodonetsk.
Sievierodonetsk came under heavy shelling, and Luhansk Gov. Serhii Haidai said the Russians were "simply intentionally trying to destroy the city... engaging in a scorched-earth approach."
Haidai said Moscow was concentrating forces and weaponry there to try to win control of Luhansk, bringing in forces from Kharkiv to the northwest, Mariupol to the south, and from inside Russia.
The sole working hospital in the city has only three doctors and supplies for 10 days, he said.
Ukrainian officials have said little since the war began about the extent of their country's casualties, but Zelenskyy said at a news conference Sunday that 50 to 100 Ukrainian fighters were being killed, apparently each day, in the east.
In a general staff morning report, Russia said it was also preparing to resume its offensive on Slovyansk, a city in Donetsk province that saw fierce fighting last month after Moscow's troops backed away from Kyiv.
The conflict was not confined to Ukraine's east. Powerful explosions were heard early Monday, for example, in Korosten, about 160 kilometers (100 miles) west of Kyiv, the town's deputy mayor said. It was the third straight day of apparent attacks in the Zhytomyr District, Ukrainian news agencies reported.
In Enerhodar, a Russian-held city 281 kilometers (174 miles) northwest of Mariupol, an explosion Sunday injured the Moscow-appointed mayor at his residence, Ukrainian and Russian news agencies reported. Ukraine's Unian news agency said a bomb planted by "local partisans" wounded 48-year-old Andrei Shevchuk, who lives near the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, Europe's largest.
Ukraine's lead negotiator, Zelenskyy adviser Mykhailo Podolyak, ruled out any territorial concessions and rejected calls for an immediate ceasefire in an interview with Reuters on Saturday, saying any concessions would backfire because Russia would use the break in fighting to come back stronger.
Recent calls for an immediate ceasefire have come from US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi.
The end of fighting in Mariupol, the biggest city Russia has captured, gave Putin a rare victory after a series of setbacks in nearly three months of combat.
Full control of Mariupol gives Russia command of a land route linking the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow seized in 2014, with mainland Russia and parts of eastern Ukraine held by pro-Russia separatists.
Russian soldiers entered Mariupol's Azovstal steelworks factory on Sunday, the last Ukrainian stronghold in the city, and began clearing mines and debris from the destroyed complex.
Denis Pushilin, the pro-Kremlin head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, vowed that the Ukrainian fighters from the plant would face tribunals.
Mariupol Mayor Vadim Boychenko warned that the city faces a health and sanitation "catastrophe" from mass burials in shallow pits and the breakdown of sewage systems. An estimated 100,000 of the 450,000 people who lived in Mariupol before the war remain.
Russia is likely experiencing a shortage of appropriate reconnaissance UAVs, which it has attempted to use to identify targets to be struck by combat jets or artillery, the British Defense Ministry said on Saturday.
This shortage is exacerbated by limitations in its domestic manufacturing capacity resulting from sanctions, the report said.
If Russia continues to lose UAVs at the current rate, Russia's reconnaissance capability will be further degraded, negatively impacting operational effectiveness, Britain said in a regular bulletin.
In a sign of Russia's urgent need to bolster its war effort in Ukraine, the former's parliament said on Friday it would consider a bill to allow Russians over 40 and foreigners over 30 to sign up for the military.
"For the use of high-precision weapons, the operation of weapons and military equipment, highly professional specialists are needed. Experience shows that they become such by the age of 40–45," it said.
Currently, only Russians aged 18-40 and foreigners aged 18-30 can enter into a first contract with the military.
Russia has suffered huge setbacks and heavy losses of men and equipment in the 86-day-old war, in which Ukraine has mobilized practically its entire adult male population.
"Clearly, the Russians are in trouble. This is the latest attempt to address manpower shortages without alarming their own population, but it is growing increasingly difficult for the Kremlin to disguise their failures in Ukraine," said retired US General Ben Hodges, a former commander of US Army forces in Europe.
Jack Watling, a land warfare specialist at the British security and defense think tank RUSI, said the Russian military was running short of infantry.
"Russia needs to stabilize manning in its military units in Ukraine and generate new units if it is to improve its position on the ground," he said.
"This will be a slow and complicated process, but can be accelerated by mobilizing people with existing skills and military experience."
The Duma said the proposed legislation would also make it easier to recruit civilian medics, engineers, and operations and communications specialists.
Separately, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Friday that Russia was forming 12 military units in its western military district in response to rising threats there, citing NATO membership bids by Finland and Sweden.
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