Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Polish President Andrzej Duda met in Kyiv on May 22, 2022, posing for photographs and shaking hands.

READ MORE: Poland’s president addressed Ukraine’s parliament Sunday.

Andrzej Duda is the first foreign head of state to speak to Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Poland has accepted more than 2 million Ukraine refugees.

There will be no cease-fire or concessions to Russia, Ukraine’s lead negotiator said Saturday as Russia upped its assault on Luhansk, one of the two provinces that make up the Donbas in eastern Ukraine.

"The war will not stop [after concessions]. It will just be put on pause for some time," Mykhailo Podolyak, who is also an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said, explaining Ukraine’s position in light of recent calls for a cease-fire from U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi. "They'll start a new offensive, even more bloody and large-scale," Podolyak added.

Pro-Russian separatists have fought Ukraine for control of the Luhansk and Donetsk provinces – which together make up the Donbas – since 2014, when Russia seized the Crimean Peninsula.

Ukrainian forces in the two provinces said via Facebook that at least seven people had been killed in Donetsk in the previous 24 hours when Russians, using aircraft, artillery, tanks, rockets, mortars and missiles, pummeled civilian structures and residential areas, Reuters reported.

The Ukrainians said they had turned back nine attacks, destroying five tanks and 10 armored vehicles, according to the Facebook post.

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