Kyiv / KHARKIV, March 2 – Ukrainians said Wednesday they were fighting in the port of Kherson, the first major city Russia claims to have conquered as airstrikes and bombings wreaked havoc on cities. Moscow failed to capture.
Nearly a week later, Russia has not yet achieved its goal of overthrowing Ukraine’s government, but according to the Ukrainian Emergency Service, it has killed more than 2,000 civilians and destroyed hospitals, kindergartens and homes.
The invasion has sent more than 870,000 people fleeing Ukraine’s borders, and retaliatory sanctions have shaken the global economy, with rising oil prices exacerbating fears of inflation. Read more
The bombing of Kharkov, an eastern city of 1.5 million people, left its center devastated by destroyed buildings and debris.
“The Russian liberators have come,” one Ukrainian volunteer sarcastically complained as he and three others strained to remove the dead body of a man wrapped in a sheet from the ruins of a main square.
After an air strike on Wednesday morning, the roof of a police building in central Kharkov collapsed as it was engulfed in flames. Authorities said 21 people had been killed in shelling and airstrikes in the city in the past 24 hours, and four more on Wednesday morning.
Moscow denies targeting civilians and says it aims to disarm Ukraine, a country of 44 million people, in a “special military operation”.
Apple, Exxon, Boeing and other companies have joined the eviction of international companies from Russian markets, leaving Moscow financially and diplomatically isolated after President Vladimir Putin ordered the February 24 invasion.
“He thought he could enter Ukraine and the world would turn upside down. Instead, he faced a wall of power he could never have expected or imagined: he met with the Ukrainian people, “US President Joe Biden said on Tuesday in his annual State of the Union address.
American lawmakers stood, applauding and roaring, many waving Ukrainian flags and wearing its blue and yellow colors. Read more
Russia has said it has sent delegates to the second round of peace talks in Belarus. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has said Russia must stop the bombing if it wants to negotiate.
Moscow said on Wednesday it had taken Kherson, the capital of the southern province of about 250,000 people, strategically located where the Dnieper River flows into the Black Sea.
Zelensky’s adviser Alexei Arestovich denied that Kherson was entirely under Russian control, saying: “The city has not fallen, our country continues to defend itself.”
Also in the south, Russia is bombing the port of Mariupol, which it says has surrounded a ring around the entire Sea of Azov. The mayor of the besieged city said Mariupol had suffered mass casualties after a night of intense strikes. He did not give the full number of victims, but said it was impossible to evacuate the injured and that water supplies were cut off.
“The enemy occupation forces of the Russian Federation have done everything to block the exit of civilians from the city with half a million inhabitants,” said Mayor Vadim Boychenko in a live broadcast on Ukrainian television.
Civilian train to throw Molotov cocktails to protect the city while the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues, in Zhytomyr, Ukraine, March 1, 2022 REUTERS / Viacheslav Ratynskyi
On the other two main fronts to the east and north, Russia has so far shown nothing to advance, with Ukraine’s two largest cities, Kyiv and Kharkiv, resisting increasingly intense bombing.
“We will see … how his brutality is increasing,” British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace told Putin in a radio interview. “He fails, he surrounds the cities, mercilessly bombards them at night … and then he will eventually try to break them up and move to the cities.”
“ORDERS US TO DELETE US”
In Kyiv, the capital of 3 million people, where residents took shelter in the subway at night, Russia blew up the main TV tower near the Holocaust memorial on Tuesday, killing passers-by.
Zelensky, in his latest update on his nation, said the attack proved that the Russians “know nothing about Kyiv, about our history.” But they all have an order to erase our history, to erase our country, to erase us all. “
Formerly tired and unshaven, Zelensky, dressed in green combat uniforms in a heavily guarded government complex, told Reuters and CNN in an interview that the bombing must stop to negotiate an end to the war.
“We need to at least stop bombing people, just stop the bombing and then sit down at the negotiating table.
Russia’s main advance on the capital – a huge armored column stretching for miles on the road to Kyiv – has been largely frozen for days, Western governments say. A senior U.S. defense official on Tuesday noted problems, including food and fuel shortages, as well as signs of deteriorating morale in Russian troops. Read more
“While it is reported that Russian forces have moved south to the center of Kherson, overall progress on the Axis has been limited over the past 24 hours,” the British Defense Ministry said in an intelligence update Wednesday morning.
“This is probably due to a combination of ongoing logistical difficulties and strong Ukrainian resistance.”
It says Russia is launching intense air and artillery strikes, especially on Kharkiv, Kyiv, Mariupol and the eastern city of Chernihiv.
The Kremlin’s decision to start a war – after months of denying such plans – shocked Russians accustomed to seeing Putin, their 22-year-old ruler, as a methodical strategist. were forced to line up in banks to save their savings, an echo of the post-Soviet economic collapse of the 1990s.
Ukraine has said more than 1,000 volunteers from 16 countries are on track to fight alongside Ukrainian forces and will release all Russian prisoners whose mothers come to pick them up.
Moscow has not given a full account of its losses so far, but Ukraine says it has killed nearly 6,000 Russian troops and captured hundreds more. Photos online show burned columns of Russian tanks surrounded by corpses.
Russia has largely eliminated domestic opposition, with major critics of Putin imprisoned or forced into exile. Leading opposition leader Alexei Navalny said from prison that Russians should protest the war every day, a spokesman tweeted.
Reuters Bureau Report Written by Peter Graf Edited by Philippa Fletcher and Catherine Evans
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