KYIV, Ukraine, Feb 24, (AP): More than a dozen senior European officials arrived in the Ukrainian capital on Tuesday in a show of support on the fourth anniversary of Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine - a grim anniversary in a war that has killed tens of thousands of people and put European leaders on edge about the scale of Moscow’s ambitions on the continent.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his country has withstood the onslaught by Russia’s bigger and better equipped army, which over the past year of fighting captured just 0.79% of Ukraine’s territory, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank.

"Looking back at the beginning of the invasion and reflecting on today, we have every right to say: we have defended our independence, we have not lost our statehood,” Zelenskyy said on social media, adding that Russian President Vladimir Putin has "not achieved his goals.”

"He has not broken Ukrainians; he has not won this war,” Zelenskyy also said. However, as the corrosive war of attrition enters its fifth year, a US-led diplomatic push to end Europe’s biggest armed conflict since World War II appears no closer to finding compromises that might make a peace deal possible.

Negotiations are stuck on what happens to the Donbas, eastern Ukraine’s industrial heartland which Russian forces mostly occupy but have failed to seize completely, and the terms of a postwar security arrangement that Kyiv is demanding to deter any future Russian invasion.

The number of soldiers killed, injured or missing on both sides could reach 2 million by spring, with Russia sustaining the largest number of troop deaths for any major power in any conflict since World War II, a report last month from the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated. European leaders see their countries’ own security at stake in Ukraine amid concerns about Putin’s wider goals and has demanded its leaders be consulted in the ongoing US-brokered talks.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz wrote on X that "for four years, every day and every night has been a nightmare for the Ukrainians - and not just for them, but for us all. Because war is back in Europe.” "We will only end it by being strong together, because the fate of Ukraine is our fate,” he added. The war has drawn in countries far beyond Ukraine, giving the conflict a global dimension, and threatened to worsen shortages, hunger and political instability in developing countries.