Faced with fierce Ukrainian resistance after a seven-day offensive by the Russian Army, President Vladimir Putin has stepped up his attack on the heart of Ukraine’s key cities, with increasingly powerful weapons. The bombings and the siege on Kiev, the capital (with 2.8 million inhabitants), also on Kharkov, the second largest city in population (1.4 million people), key to the control of the northeastern border of Ukraine, intensify. Russian-speaking majority and where this morning Moscow has launched groups of paratroopers, who have attacked a military hospital. Later an attack reached the Uspenski Cathedral. Although there is no official figure for the total number of fatalities since the beginning of the offensive, the United Nations counts 136, a figure that the Ukrainian Emergency Service raises to at least 2,000 dead civilians. In the last 24 hours alone, the attacks in Kharkov have left 21 dead.
Russia has offered this Wednesday for the first time a balance of victims in its own ranks, which point to 498 Russian soldiers killed and 1,597 wounded in the first week of the invasion. Meanwhile, after a week of attacks by land, sea and air against Ukraine, the flow of refugees fleeing the violence does not stop. At least 874,026 people have left their homes in the last week in the direction of neighboring countries, according to the UN, especially Poland, where more than 300,000 citizens had already arrived on Monday.
The Russian offensive has intensified in Kiev with bombings such as had not been seen since the beginning of the attack ordered by Putin in the early hours of last Thursday. At the end of the day on Wednesday, the center of Kiev has been the scene of an explosion. An “important heating pipe” has been damaged by a missile attack in the vicinity of the train station, according to Ukrainian government sources. The train station, along with the bus station, is one of the most frequented places these days by tens of thousands of inhabitants who use its facilities to leave the capital. The explosion threatened to leave part of the city without heating on the night of Wednesday to Thursday, add the same sources. The defense of the Ukrainian Army managed to shoot down the Russian missile and its remains are the ones that damaged the pipeline, clarify the country’s authorities.
The Russian Army has warned the population to leave the capital to avoid the offensive that, according to Moscow, will hit strategic points of Ukrainian security and communications in the city. Meanwhile, the invading forces of the Kremlin are advancing on the southern flank and have already made significant progress. On the seventh day of the invasion, the Kremlin forces, who had already taken control of the city of Berdyansk (113,000 inhabitants), on the Sea of Azov, have forcefully entered Kherson (290,000 registered), an important city in the Black Sea, and the harsh siege of the large town of Mariupol (446,000 people) continues. “Many of our cities and towns are now suffering from Russian terror,” said Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksi Reznikov.
Coinciding with this offensive, Moscow and Kiev planned this Wednesday to resume negotiations to stop the offensive, but finally the appointment was delayed. Putin’s delegation is already in the Brest region (Belarus), where he is waiting for the Ukrainian delegation to speak on Thursday. “We decided together that it is more convenient there for us and for the Ukrainian side. Brest has a good airport and the Ukrainians are closer to the border with Poland,” the head of the Russian group, former Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinski, explained to Interfax. At the last minute, the Ukrainian government also confirmed that his delegation was on its way to the meeting.
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Earlier, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, gave an interview to the Al Jazeera network where he outlined the conditions that his government sets: “Crimea is part of Russia; recognition of the people’s republics with the borders of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and demilitarization [de Ucrania]”.
Advance on the coast towards the Black Sea
On Tuesday, Russian forces tightened their siege on Kherson, a city with a strategic shipping industry in northwest Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014 and which the Kremlin has used as a launch pad for the invasion. Putin’s Army, which had launched attacks on the town for several days, entered the city on Tuesday, according to the mayor, Igor Kolyjayev, who assured, however, that the Ukrainian government maintains control of the city. Throughout Tuesday, Kremlin forces had surrounded the southern city and set up checkpoints at all its exits.
The taking of Kherson would facilitate the assault on Odessa, the other great city on the Black Sea, with 993,000 inhabitants, and, therefore, the control of the Ukrainian outlet to the sea. Towards some waters, moreover, where three other countries have coasts: Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria. Now, with the city under siege and in a very difficult situation, Mayor Kolyjayev said he expected a “miracle” and asked for help to create a corridor to evacuate the wounded and receive supplies.
The British Minister of Defense, Ben Wallace, has corroborated this statement by the Ukrainian authorities on Wednesday by assuring the BBC that “none of the main cities has been taken” by the Russians. Wallace has also stressed that the Kremlin troops fighting in Ukraine have “low morale” and that “many surrenders” are taking place.
The large southern city of Mariupol is almost completely surrounded by Putin’s forces. There, most neighborhoods have gone days without heat, gas, or electricity; some also without water. Russia has bombed the city’s electrical substations, cutting off supplies to facilitate the siege. In addition, Russian forces shelled several skyscrapers in residential areas of the city on Tuesday, according to the mayor, Vadym Boychenko. “Enemy forces are coming to Mariupol from all directions, destroying our infrastructure, killing our women, children and elderly, and calling it a war to liberate us,” Boychenko said in a video released on Tuesday. Mariupol is a prized piece for Putin. Taking it would allow it to facilitate the construction of a long-awaited corridor linking Crimea and Donbas.
Military analysts fear that Putin will further harden his attacks to demoralize the resistance. Meanwhile, the advance of the large column of Russian military vehicles – about 60 kilometers – that has been advancing for a couple of days from the northwest towards Kiev has slowed its pace due to the shortage of fuel and food, according to sources from the United Kingdom and United States.
The Kiev TV tower
One of the priority objectives of the Kremlin, in addition to gaining control of the strategic south of the country and Donbas, is undoubtedly Kiev, the heart of Ukraine. On Tuesday, an airstrike on the city’s television tower killed five people who were in the area and injured five others. The television tower is located in the Babi Yar area, where between 100,000 and 150,000 people were executed during the Nazi occupation of Kiev in World War II.
The attack on this target in the capital of Ukraine, ruled by a Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky, caused the immediate rejection of the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center. “Putin seeking to distort and manipulate the Holocaust to justify an illegal invasion of a sovereign democratic country is absolutely abhorrent,” Nathan Sharanski, the center’s president and former Israeli deputy prime minister, said in a statement. “It is symbolic that he starts attacking Kiev by bombing the site of Babin Yar, the biggest of the Nazi massacres,” said Sharanski, who was born in Donetsk.
And as civilian casualties mount, President Zelensky is raising the tone with the international community. The Ukrainian president has called on NATO to impose a no-fly zone over the country to stop the brutal bombing. “A missile aimed at the central square of a city is open and undisguised terrorism,” the Ukrainian president said on Tuesday, following the attack on the Kharkov regional administration building on the iconic Independence Square. “It is terrorism that intends to break us, to break our resistance,” Zelensky assured that on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday he had a 30-minute conversation with US President Joe Biden.
As the offensive against Ukraine increases, the isolation of Putin’s Russia also hardens. The tide of sanctions has affected the waterline of its economy, which is under “great pressure”, acknowledged Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov, who, however, has predicted that the Russian economy “will remain on its feet” . The Russian stock market, with the ruble plummeting, will also remain closed this Wednesday while the first symptoms of a corralito begin to be seen in the Eurasian country, the largest in the world by area, with 144 million inhabitants. Putin has banned citizens from taking out more than $10,000 (9,000 euros) in foreign currency starting Wednesday, according to the official Tass news agency, as the country struggles to contain the widespread financial impact of Ukraine invasion sanctions. .
In Russia, critical voices are also beginning to rise, although, at the moment, they are in the minority. Opposition leader Alexei Navalni, imprisoned in a prison east of Moscow, called on Wednesday for daily mobilization inside and outside Russia against the invasion of Ukraine and against Russian President Vladimir Putin. “If to stop the war we have to fill the prisons, we will do it. Do not declare yourself against the war, fight against the war”, He has stated on his Twitter account.
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