Ukraine has pleaded with Western countries for faster deliveries of weapons as Russian forces pound the east of the country.

Ukrainian troops “are doing everything to stop the offensive, as much as they possibly can, as long as there are enough heavy weapons, modern artillery — all that we have asked for and continue to ask for from our partners,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address on June 10.

Zelenskiy said “very difficult battles” were ongoing, including in the eastern Donbas region where Moscow has concentrated its firepower.

Zelenskiy said Russia wants to destroy every city in the Donbas.

“Every city, that’s not an exaggeration. Like Volnovakha, like Mariupol. All of these ruins of once-happy cities, the black traces of fires, the craters from explosions — this is all that Russia can give to its neighbors, to Europe, to the world.”

The fiercest fighting remains around the eastern industrial town of Syevyerodonetsk, a small city that has become the focus of Russia’s advance in eastern Ukraine.

The war in the east is now primarily an artillery battle in which Kyiv is severely outgunned, Ukrainian officials say.

“This is an artillery war now,” Vadym Skibitsky, Ukraine’s deputy head of military intelligence, told The Guardian.

“Everything now depends on what [the West] gives us. Ukraine has one artillery piece to 10 to 15 Russian artillery pieces.”

Germany, among the largest suppliers of weapons since Russia invaded but criticized for being slow to supply the heavy weaponry Kyiv says it needs, plans to revise its rules on arms exports to make it easier to arm democracies like Ukraine, Der Spiegel reported on June 10.

Ukraine also asked for humanitarian support to combat an outbreak of dysentery and cholera in the port city of Mariupol, which has been reduced to ruins.

Mayor Vadym Boychenko told national television that sanitation systems were broken and corpses were rotting in the streets.

“Unfortunately…these infection outbreaks will claim thousands more Mariupolites,” Boychenko said.

Meanwhile, on June 11, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin reinforced Washington’s commitment to the region in light of Russia’s unprovoked war on Ukraine.

“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is what happens when oppressors trample the rules that protect us all,” Austin told an Asian security forum in Singapore. “It’s a preview of a possible world of chaos and turmoil that none of us would want to live in.”

Zelenskiy is expected to give a virtual address to the conference later in the day.