RRussia is waging an ‘all-out war’ against Ukraine and the battle in the country’s east is likely to escalate, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, said in a speech marking three months since the start of the invasion , reports Roland Olifant.

“The next few weeks of war will be difficult, and we must be aware of that,” Zelensky said in his nightly address to the nation on Monday.

“But we have no alternative but to fight and win, to liberate our land and our people.” “The most difficult combat situation today is in the Donbass,” Zelensky said.

He singled out the towns of Bakhmut, Popasna and Severodonetsk, where he said “the occupiers have concentrated the greatest activity at the moment. They have staged a massacre there and are trying to destroy all life, literally. No one has destroyed the Donbass like the Russian army does now”,

He said Russia carried out nearly 1,500 missile strikes and more than 3,000 airstrikes against Ukraine in the first three months of the war.

In a separate address to the World Economic Forum in Davos – from which the Russians were excluded this year – he said slow military aid was causing unnecessary deaths as Ukrainians “pay dearly for freedom and independence”.

Mr Zelensky said via video link that tens of thousands of lives would have been saved if kyiv had received “100% of our needs at once in February”, during the Russian invasion.

He said 87 people were killed in a Russian attack earlier this month on a military base in the north, in what would be one of the largest recorded strikes of the war.