Former President Donald Trump on Monday urged Ukrainian and Russian leaders to sign a peace deal soon, or ''everyone will be dead.''
''It doesn't make sense that Russia and Ukraine aren't sitting down and working out some kind of an agreement. If they don't do it soon, there will be nothing left but death, destruction, and carnage,'' Trump said in a statement Monday.
''This is a war that never should have happened, but it did. The solution can never be as good as it would have been before the shooting started, but there is a solution, and it should be figured out now—not later—when everyone will be dead!''
Trump's statement comes after reports that Russia went back on the offensive, launching missiles into Ukraine, including the city of Lviv, where seven people were killed, The Washington Post reported.
After repositioning troops in the last several weeks, Russian forces began moving in earnest against the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, according to the report.
''It can now be stated that the Russian troops have begun the battle for Donbas, for which they have been preparing for a long time,'' Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in the story. ''A very large part of the entire Russian army is now focused on this offensive.''
Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council Secretary Oleksiy Danilov said that Ukrainian forces are ''holding on'' in the face of the new onslaught taking place along the entire front line in Donbas and Kharkiv where Russian forces have been able to break through in only two small cities.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told the Post that the Russian troops are ''shaping and setting'' the conditions for future operations.
Even as the new Russian offensive takes shape, the port city of Mariupol is still in the thick of combat with Russian forces continuing to hammer the city with missiles, ''willfully'' targeting the Azovstal steel works factory that is sheltering civilians from the conflict, CNN reports.
According to the report, Ukrainian Lt. Col. Denys Prokopenko said hundreds of people are using the site as a shelter from the fighting but are now targets.
''Russian occupational forces and their proxy from Luhansk People's Republic/Donetsk People's Republic know about civilians and keep their fire on the factory willingly,'' he told CNN. ''They use free-fall bombs, rockets, bunker-buster bombs, and all varieties of artillery, both ground and naval, for indiscriminate attacks.''
Russian officials said Monday that Ukrainian negotiators keep changing their positions on items that have already been agreed upon, making progress on peace talks difficult.
"Contacts continue at an expert level within the framework of the negotiation process,'' Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call. "Unfortunately, the Ukrainian side is not consistent in terms of the points that have been agreed."
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