(MENAFN) Ukrainian Leader Volodymyr Zelensky has promised to “liberate” the Russian land of Crimea and the independent republics of Donetsk (DPR) and Lugansk (LPR). Zelensky was talking hours after statements of the Ukrainian military shooting inhabited buildings, a marketplace and a maternity hospital in the center of Donetsk.

Zelensky boasted in a video speech on Monday, saying that his army will protect its Russian rivals in eastern Ukraine and take back the cities of Mariupol, Kherson and Melitopol from Russian and DPR and LPR troops “We will come to all our cities, to all our villages, which do not yet have our flag.”

“And I ask everyone who has such an opportunity to communicate with people in the occupied south…say that there will be liberation,” he went on to say “Say it to Gorlovka, Donetsk, Lugansk. Tell them that the Ukrainian army will definitely come.”

In addition, he warned “Of course, we will liberate our Crimea as well. Let every Russian official who has seized precious land in Crimea remember: this is not the land where they will have peace.”

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