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Ukrainians with machine gun ammunition belts.
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The mutual exhaustion of forces inside and behind the fronts and approaching autumn mud could have more of an impact on the war’s progress than the UN-attended Ukrainian-Turkish summit in Lviv on Thursday.
“Russia will not win this war,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Thursday while visiting a military hospital in Lviv. He awarded medals to wounded soldiers, called them “heroes” and thanked the Armed Forces “for protecting the Ukrainian country”.
The hospital visit came shortly before Zelenskiy met Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and UN Secretary General António Guterres in Lviv. In the historically important city of 700,000 not far from the Polish border, once the capital of the Austrian crown lands of Galicia and Lodomeria until 1918, talk was over the progress of grain deliveries from Ukraine across the Black Sea, the explosive the situation in and around the Russian-occupied Zaporizhia nuclear power plant – and above all the attempt to find a diplomatic solution between Kyiv and Moscow to end the war, at least for the time being, which Zelensky believes Russia cannot win.