‘Very soon there will be two Victory Days in Ukraine’, says Zelenskyy

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declared in a May 9 address that his country would eventually defeat the Russians.

“Very soon there will be two Victory Days in Ukraine,” Zelenskyy said in a video message.

“We are fighting for freedom, for our children, and therefore we will win,” he added.

This address came as Russian President Vladimir Putin marked his country’s biggest patriotic holiday on Monday.

Meanwhile, intense fighting rages in Ukraine’s east, the vital Black Sea port of Odesa in the south has came under repeated missile attack, and Russian forces are seeking to finish off the Ukrainian defenders making their last stand at a steel plant in Mariupol.

Putin has long bristled at NATO’s push eastward into former Soviet republics, and argued on Monday that Russia had to invade Ukraine before an “inevitable” clash. Ukrainian leaders and their Western backers have denied that Kyiv or NATO posed any threat.

Putin once again claimed that the military operation in Ukraine was a battle against Nazism, linking the war to the defeat of Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union lost 27 million people in what Russia refers to as the Great Patriotic War.

The Ukrainian military warned of a high probability of missile strikes around the holiday, and some cities imposed curfews or warned people not to gather in public places.

Watch our live report from correspondent Anelise Borges in Odesa in the video player above.