An elderly woman is helped by police after she was rescued by firefighters from inside her apartment following a bombing in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Tuesday.
Felipe Dana / AP
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Felipe Dana / AP
An elderly woman is helped by police after she was rescued by firefighters from inside her apartment following a bombing in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Tuesday.
Felipe Dana / AP
KYIV, Ukraine – Russia escalated its bombardment of the Ukrainian capital and launched new attacks on the port city of Mariupol, making bloody strides on the ground as Ukraine’s president prepared Wednesday to issue a call Called directly for more help in a rare speech by a foreign leader to the US Congress.
As the invasion enters its third week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy thinks there is still some reason to be optimistic that negotiations can still reach an agreement with the Russian government.
After their delegations met Tuesday via video, Zelenskyy said that Russia’s demands were becoming “more realistic”. The parties are expected to talk again late Wednesday.
“It still takes effort, it takes patience,” he said in a video address to the nation. “Any war ends with an agreement.”
Developments on the diplomatic front and on the ground come as the number of people fleeing Ukraine amid Europe’s heaviest fighting since World War II drops by 3 million.
Zelenskyy, previewing his speech to the US Congress, thanked President Joe Biden and “all friends of Ukraine” for the new $13.6 billion in support.
He called for more weapons and more sanctions to punish Russia and repeated his call to “close the skies of Ukraine to Russian missiles and planes.”
He said Russian forces were unable to advance further into Ukrainian territory on Tuesday but continued to shell the cities intensely.
Over the past day, 28,893 civilians were able to flee the fighting through nine humanitarian corridors, even though the Russians refused to allow aid into Mariupol, he said.
Interior Ministry adviser Anton Gerashchenko said Russian warships at around midnight fired missiles and artillery on the Ukrainian coast near Tuzla, south of Odesa.
“They fired a large amount of ammunition from a great distance,” he said Wednesday on Facebook.
Ukrainian servicemen and volunteers carry a man injured during the shelling attack on the 3rd hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine on Tuesday.
Evgeniy Maloletka / AP
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Evgeniy Maloletka / AP
Ukrainian servicemen and volunteers carry a man injured during the shelling attack on the 3rd hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine on Tuesday.
Evgeniy Maloletka / AP
Gerashchenko said Russia wants to test Ukraine’s coastal defense system. He said there was no attempt to land troops. He did not say whether any of the shelling had hit anything.
On Tuesday, the leaders of three European Union countries – Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia – visited Kyiv to show strong support amid the peril.
The Russian bombardment of the capital appeared to be becoming more systematic and moving closer to the city center, destroying apartments, a metro station and other civilian sites. Zelenskyy said the barge crashed into four multi-storey buildings and killed dozens of people.
A senior US defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the Pentagon’s assessment, said the Russians were using long-range firepower to strike civilian targets inside Kyiv with increasing frequency. increased, but their ground forces made no progress across the country. . The official said Russian troops were still about 15 kilometers (9 miles) from the center of the capital.
The official said the United States has seen signs that Russia believes it may need more troops or supplies than it has in Ukraine, and it is looking at ways to bring more resources into the country. this. Officials did not elaborate.
An employee of a Russian state television station arrested after interrupting a live news program over protesting the war in Ukraine said she was not allowed to sleep in a police detention center and was questioned for 14 hours.
She was fined about $270, but could still face jail time.
“These were very difficult days in my life because I went literally two days without sleep, the interrogation lasted more than 14 hours and they didn’t allow me to contact my family and close friends. , did not provide any legal assistance,” said Marina Ovsyannikova after she was released.
Ovsyannikova, a Channel 1 employee, entered the studio on Monday night’s news with a poster that said “stop the war, don’t believe the propaganda, they are lying to you here .” In English it says “no war” at the top of the poster and “Russians against war” at the bottom.
Ahead of Tuesday’s talks, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Moscow would press for Ukraine to abandon its efforts to join NATO, adopt neutrality and “demilitarize”.
In a statement that appeared to signal potential grounds for a deal with Moscow, Zelenskyy told European leaders gathered in London that he saw NATO’s intention to accept Ukraine.
“We have heard for years about open doors, but we have also heard that we cannot enter those doors,” he said. “This is the truth, and we simply have to accept it as it is.”
NATO does not admit countries with unresolved territorial conflicts. Zelenskyy has said repeatedly that he realizes that NATO will not offer Ukraine membership and that he can consider a neutral status for his country but needs strong security guarantees from both sides. West and Russia.
The United Nations says nearly 700 civilians in Ukraine have been confirmed dead, with the real number probably much higher.
On a day when thousands of people tried to leave Mariupol, Russian troops seized the city’s largest hospital, said Pavlo Kyrylenko, regional leader. He said the military forced about 400 people from nearby homes into the Regional Intensive Care Hospital and used them and about 100 patients and staff as shields by not allowing them to leave.
Kyrylenko said the shelling had severely damaged the main building of the hospital, but that medical staff were still treating patients in makeshift wards in the basement.
Doctors from other hospitals in Mariupol made a video to tell the world about the horrors they had to witness. “We don’t want to be heroes and martyrs,” said one woman. She also said that it wasn’t enough to simply call people the injured: “It had its arms and legs ripped off, eyes gouged out, the body was torn to pieces, the inside fell out.”
Two journalists working for Fox News were killed when the car they were traveling in caught fire on Monday outside Kyiv, the network said. Fox identified the two as video journalist Pierre Zakrzewski and Ukrainian journalist Oleksandra “Sasha” Kuvshynova, who were helping the Fox team navigate the area. Another journalist was killed Sunday in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, fighting intensified on the outskirts of Kyiv, and air raid sirens sounded inside the capital. The mayor has imposed a curfew until Thursday morning. Tuesday’s artillery attacks hit the Svyatoshynskyi district in western Kyiv.
“Yesterday we put out this fire, today we put out another fire. It was very difficult,” said a firefighter who only gave his last name, Andriy, outside the 15-story apartment building that was hit by the impact and water. eyes fell. “People are dying, and the worst thing is children are dying. They haven’t lived to the fullest and they’ve seen this.”
