Latest
  • Ukrainian officials renewed calls for additional arms from the West.
  • President Volodymyr Zelensky responded to a petition to lift the ban on fighting-age men leaving Ukraine.
  • Biden says Zelensky turned aside pre-invasion warnings of Russia’s intent.
  • The U.K. Defense Ministry warned of the potential for cholera outbreaks in Mariupol.

KHARKIV, Ukraine—Ukraine issued fresh calls for urgent supplies of weapons from the West, as officials warned that the war with Russia was rapidly becoming a series of artillery battles that favor Moscow’s better-equipped forces.

“Ukrainian troops are doing everything to stop the offensive of the occupiers, as much as is possible,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his late-evening address to the nation on Friday. “As much as the heavy weapons and modern artillery—all that we have asked and continue to ask our partners for—allow them to.”

Ukraine’s rapidly dwindling supply of arms and ammunition has become a key factor holding back its efforts to defend the country from the Russian invasion, officials say, as Russia’s superior artillery arsenal bolsters its ability to keep prosecuting a military campaign that started in February.

Amid increasingly frank Ukrainian assessments of the difficult defense effort, President Biden said that Mr. Zelensky had dismissed U.S. warnings about a Russian invasion in the weeks before it began on February 24.

“I know a lot of people thought I was exaggerating,” Mr. Biden said of his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin’s plans. Mr. Biden, speaking at a reception for the Democratic National Committee in Los Angeles on Friday, said the U.S. had data showing Mr. Putin planned to invade, “and Zelensky didn’t want to hear it, nor did a lot of people.”

Responding to Mr. Biden, Mr. Zelensky’s spokesman Sergii Nykyforov said the two presidents had several conversations ahead of the invasion to discuss the evidence provided by the U.S. side. Kyiv had urged U.S. sanctions to deter Russian military action, Mr. Nykyforov told Ukrainian media on Saturday, but “our partners didn’t want to hear it.”

Meanwhile, troops on the front line in Donbas, an area that includes the Donetsk and Luhansk regions claimed by Russian-backed separatists in east Ukraine, say that they are left with critically low levels of ammunition as they face battles now largely revolving around artillery exchanges that give the advantage to Russian units that have no shortage of arms.

“Considering the current prevalence of protracted positional battles, especially in the Severodonetsk-Lysychansk area, Ukrainian forces urgently need fresh supplies of artillery systems,” the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, wrote in its daily analysis of the war on June 10. “Effective artillery will be increasingly decisive in the largely static fighting in eastern Ukraine.”

Residents pump water in the city of Slovyansk, which Ukrainian officials say is among Russia’s next targets.

Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images

The Ukrainian news agency UNIAN on Saturday published a photo of what it said was the first U.S.-supplied M777 artillery system destroyed by Russian forces near Lysychansk, a city in the Luhansk region. There was no comment from official Ukrainian sources.

The General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces on Saturday said that Russia was preparing an assault on the Donbas city of Slovyansk as it looks to push west amid the continuing offensive on Severodonetsk, where Ukrainian troops are coming under intense artillery barrages launched from the captured city of Lyman to the west.

Russia has spent weeks trying to take Severodonetsk, which would give its forces almost complete control over the Luhansk region. The region’s Ukrainian governor said on Saturday that Moscow’s troops were also strengthening their positions in the village of Orikhove, south of Severodonetsk, as they looked for new axes to redouble their attacks on the strategic city.

In parts of Ukraine that it already occupies, in the southern Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, Russia said Saturday that it had begun distributing passports to local residents. Vladimir Rogov, a member of the Russian-installed administration in the Zaporizhzhia region, said recipients of Russian passports would become full-fledged citizens of Russia, state news agency TASS reported.

Ukraine’s defense of its eastern regions hinges largely on the artillery at its disposal, analysts say.

Photo: REUTERS

A view of Lysychansk, with smoke and dust rising in the background from the nearby city of Severodonetsk, on Thursday.

Photo: aris messinis/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

More than 70,000 people in the Zaporizhzhia region had applied for Russian citizenship as of June 6, Mr. Rogov was cited as saying. TASS on Saturday published video showing a small group of Kherson residents receiving Russian passports, among them the city’s former mayor, Volodymyr Saldo. Ukraine has denounced Russia’s efforts to cement its hold over occupied territories, and officials have pledged to recapture them.

Separately, Mr. Zelensky responded to an online petition calling for an end to the ban on fighting-age men leaving Ukraine, which has gathered more than 27,000 signatures since it was posted to the president’s website. The prime minister’s office is considering the petition.

Citing Ukraine’s constitution, Mr. Zelensky said “defense of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the state is the duty of the whole Ukrainian nation.” The prohibition on Ukrainian men ages 18 to 60 leaving the country was imposed within hours of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announcement of the invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, and it has been prolonged on two occasions. The prohibition is in force until the end of August.

The U.K. Ministry of Defense warned that health conditions had deteriorated in the Russian-occupied port city of Mariupol, leading to the possibility of outbreaks of cholera and other diseases. The report of local health conditions couldn’t be independently verified.

The British defense department said access to safe drinking water was inconsistent in Russian-occupied areas and that Mariupol was “at risk of a major cholera outbreak. Isolated cases of cholera have been reported since May.’’

The United Nations human rights office condemned the death sentences handed down this week by a Russian-backed court to three foreign fighters—two British citizens and one Moroccan—labeling such trials as “a war crime.’’ The court, in the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic, a separatist region of Ukraine, said the three men were guilty of working as mercenaries by fighting alongside Ukrainians.

The U.N., like the British government, said the men were combatants within the Ukrainian armed forces rather than mercenaries and should be treated as prisoners of war. ‘’Such trials against prisoners of war amount to a war crime,’’ Ravina Shamdasani, spokeswoman for the U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, said Friday.

—Georgi Kantchev contributed to this article.

Civilians were evacuated from the city of Slovyansk in the Donbas region on Thursday.

Photo: aris messinis/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Write to Matthew Luxmoore at Matthew.Luxmoore@wsj.com