President Zelensky has a grim forecast regarding Vladimir Putin’s intentions for the embattled eastern regions of Ukraine, saying in a video address overnight: “In the near future, Russian troops want to literally finish off and destroy the Donbas, destroy everything that once gave glory to this industrial region.” 

The Ukrainian news site RBC reported that Mr. Zelensky also said, “Just as the Russian military is destroying Mariupol, they want to wipe out other cities of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.”

Yet the Russian military refocus on the east is not leaving the west unspared. 

Multiple explosions in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv Monday, believed to be caused by missiles, were witnessed by reporters for the Associated Press. The attacks prompted a Ukrainian presidential advisor, Mykhailo Podolyak, to tweet, “Five powerful missile strikes at once on the civilian infrastructure of the old European Lviv. The Russians continue barbarically attacking Ukrainian cities from the air, cynically declaring to the whole world their ‘right’ to… kill Ukrainians.”

In an earlier address, Mr. Zelensky noted that Russian bombardment of Kharkiv has not abated and that 18 people were killed and 106 wounded by Russian shelling in the four days leading up to April 17. He characterized the use of mortars and artillery against residential neighborhoods and ordinary civilians as “nothing but deliberate terror.”

As Russia continues to pummel Ukrainian cities, and despite the operation shift to the east, its core objective remains unchanged: as the British Ministry of Defense put it, “compelling Ukraine to abandon its Euro-Atlantic orientation and asserting its own regional dominance.” 

That assertion of regional dominance comes not just through missile strikes and bombs but via less deadly though insidious means. The Kremlin is actively trying to not only wrest chunks of the country from Kyiv’s control but to restitch them into the fabric of the Russian Federation. 

“The occupiers are trying to tear off the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, following the example of the so-called DPR and LPR. This territory is being transferred to the ruble zone and subordinated to the administrative machine of Russia,” Mr. Zelensky said via video.

Other recent developments regarding Ukraine include one of Fleet Street’s best-known titles, the Mirror, running this alarmist headline over the weekend: “Zelensky warns of Russian nuclear attack and calls for stockpile of radiation pills.” 

It is true that Mr. Zelensky, in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, spoke of the threat of Russia’s use of nuclear or chemical weapons. As for a call to “stockpile” radiation pills, the newspaper says he made the “grim warning” on his Telegram channel but it failed to provide a direct quote to that effect.  Britain’s tabloid Sun newspaper ran with the story as well.

Meanwhile, the Guardian ran an intriguing weekend piece about how Mr. Zelensky’s nightly video addresses to the people of Ukraine serve as “a masterclass in message” and counterpoint to Ukraine’s mixed fortunes on the battlefield. The writer of those addresses is “a 38-year-old former journalist and political analyst with fewer than 200 followers on Twitter,” Dmytro Lytvyn. 

“In the speeches, emotions are most important. And of course the president is author of emotions and the logic of the words,” Mr. Lytvyn told the Guardian. 

If shrewd messaging that appeals to the Ukrainian sense of national pride is a boost to morale after several exhausting weeks of death and destruction, the primacy Mr. Zelensky’s communications team places on “emotions” may serve to obfuscate some harsh realities of a conflict that, despite comprehensible wishes to the contrary, cannot always be painted in black and white terms.

Writing in The New York Sun, Conrad Black recently evoked “the fact which dare not speak its name, especially in the presence of President Zelensky, that approximately nine million Ukrainians in the Crimea and eastern Ukraine are Russian-speaking and might probably prefer to be Russians rather than Ukrainians.” Mr. Black asserts that “Russia has some legitimate claims, even though it is pursuing them in a totally illegal and barbarous manner.”  

In his speeches, Mr. Zelensky holds firm that no Ukrainian territory will be sacrificed, and even though “there’s no need to contradict him publicly,” Mr. Black posited, “if the ethnically Russian areas wish to be in Russia, that is their right,” and added: “The basis of peace must be the expansion of Russia to include those Ukrainians who would rather be in Russia in exchange for Russian acceptance that the balance of Ukraine is a sovereign country.” 

How to steer the bulk of Ukraine toward the realization that some territorial compromise may indeed be indicated for peace negotiations to bear fruit — sour or otherwise? So far all have failed, and the vortex of war risks sucking in countries that, as a French expression goes, have other cats to whip. While Mr. Zelensky’s message-crafters may have thoughts on this, his office says the issue of settling the status of the occupied territories of Donbas and Crimea remains open. 

The president himself has said, “I think we need to talk about it.”