Russia wants to split Ukraine into two, as happened with North and South Korea, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief said on Sunday, vowing “total” guerilla warfare to prevent a carve up of the country. President Volodymyr Zelensky urged the West to give Ukraine tanks, planes and missiles to help fend off the Russian forces, which the Kyiv government said were increasingly targeting fuel and food depots. Meanwhile, US officials continued efforts to soften comments made by US President Joe Biden on Saturday, who said in a fiery speech in Poland that Russian leader Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power”. After more than four weeks of conflict, Russia has failed to seize any major Ukrainian city and Moscow signalled on Friday it was scaling back its ambitions to focus on securing the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting the Ukrainian army for eight years. A local leader in the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic in the east of Ukraine said on Sunday the region could soon hold a referendum on joining Russia, just as happened in Crimea after Russia seized the Ukrainian peninsula in 2014. Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to break with Ukraine and join Russia, a vote much of the world refused to recognise. “In fact, it is an attempt to create North and South Korea in Ukraine,” Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukrainian military intelligence, said in a statement, referring to the division of Korea after World War Two. He predicted Ukraine’s army would push back Russian forces. “In addition, the season of a total Ukrainian guerilla safari will soon begin. Then there will be one relevant scenario left for the Russians, how to survive,” he said. ‘One per cent of Mariupol’s courage’ Moscow says the goals for what Putin calls a “special military operation” include demilitarising and “denazifying” its neighbour. Ukraine and its Western allies say this is a pretext for an unprovoked invasion which has devastated cities, caused a humanitarian crisis and displaced an estimated 10 million people. Zelensky demanded Western nations hand over military hardware, saying his nation needed just one per cent of Nato’s aircraft and one per cent of its tanks. He lashed out at the West’s “ping-pong about who and how should hand over jets” and other weapons while Russian missile attacks killed and trapped civilians. “I’ve talked to the defenders of Mariupol today,” he said in a video address on Sunday, referring to the besieged southern city that has suffered some of the war’s greatest deprivations and horrors. “I’m in constant contact with them. Their determination, heroism and firmness are astonishing.” “If only those who have been thinking for 31 days on how to hand over dozens of jets and tanks had one per cent of their courage.” Globalisation teeters after one-two punch of pandemic and war Western nations have so far given Ukraine anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles as well as small arms and protective equipment, but have not offered heavy armour or planes. Ukrainian Interior Ministry adviser Vadym Denysenko said on Sunday that Russia had started destroying Ukrainian fuel and food storage centres. Appearing to confirm that, the Russian defence ministry said its missiles had wrecked a fuel deposit on Saturday as well as a military repair plant near the western city of Lviv, just 60km (40 miles) from the Polish border. In its latest military assessment, the British Ministry of Defence said Russian forces appeared to be concentrating their efforts on encircling Ukrainian troops directly facing separatist regions in the east. Biden drew criticism for his improvised remarks during a speech in Warsaw that sought to frame the war as part of a historic struggle for democratic freedoms. “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden said of Putin. Earlier he called the Russian leader a “butcher”. Veteran US diplomat Richard Haass, president of American think-tank the Council on Foreign Relations, said on Twitter the comments made “a dangerous situation more dangerous”. US officials tried to walk back the president’s words, with a White House official saying they were not a call for Putin’s removal, but rather meant that he should not be allowed to exercise power over his neighbours or the region. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Sunday the US did not have “a strategy of regime change in Russia, or anywhere else, for that matter”. As Russia and China distract US, Middle East powers redraw alliances The United Nations has confirmed 1,104 civilian deaths and 1,754 injuries across Ukraine but says the real toll is likely to be higher. Ukraine said on Sunday 139 children had been killed and more than 205 wounded so far in the conflict. Ukraine and Russia have agreed two “humanitarian corridors” to evacuate civilians from frontline areas on Sunday, including allowing people to leave by private car from the southern city of Mariupol, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said. The encircled port, which lies between Russian-annexed Crimea and eastern areas held by Russian-backed separatists, has been devastated by weeks of heavy bombardment, forcing thousands of residents to take shelter in basements with scarce water, food, medicine or power.