Kyiv - Uplifting Father’s Day on Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy posted 10 photos of parents and children set against the grim backdrop of war, praising fathers who “protect and defend the most precious.”

One photograph shows a kneeling soldier kissing a child inside a subway station, where Ukraine families shelter from Russian airstrikes. In another, an infant and a woman who appears on the brink of tears look out from a departing train car as a man peers inside, his hand spread across the window in a gesture of goodbye.

There are scenes of childbirth, as a man and woman look toward a swaddled baby in what appears to be a hospital room where the spackled walls show scars of fighting. In another, a man lifts a child over a fence toward a woman with outstretched arms on a train platform.

“Being a father is a great responsibility and a great happiness,” Zelenskyy wrote in English text that followed the Ukrainian on Instagram. “It is strength, wisdom, motivation to go forward and not to give up.”

He urged his nation’s fighters to endure for the “future of your family, your children, and therefore the whole of Ukraine.”

His message came as four months of war in Ukraine appear to be straining the morale of troops on both sides, prompting desertions and rebellion against officers’ orders. NATO’s chief warned the fighting could drag on for “years.”

In his nightly address Sunday, Zelenskyy said the week ahead would be “historic” and perhaps bring Ukraine closer to membership in the European Union. But that move could portend a more hostile response from Russia, he warned.
-AP