© AP
UKRAINE-WAR
More than a million people have fled Ukraine following the Russian invasion, in the fastest refugee exodus of a century, it said on Thursday. United Nations. Russian forces continued to shell the country’s second largest city, Kharkiv, and besieged two strategic ports.
The number of refugees provided by the UN to The Associated Press was reached on Wednesday and means that more than 2% of the Ukrainian population has been expelled from the country in less than a week. The mass evacuation was evident in Kharkiv, where residents desperate to escape shelling packed the city’s train station and jammed trains, sometimes not knowing where they were going.
Overnight, Associated Press reporters in Kiev they heard at least one explosion before videos of apparent attacks on the capital began to circulate. The objectives were not clear at first.
A statement from the general staff of Ukraine’s armed forces did not mention the attacks in the capital, saying only that Russian forces were “regrouping” and “trying to reach the northern outskirts” of the city.
“The advance on Kiev has not been very organized and now they are more or less stuck,” he told the AP in Moscow the military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer.
In a videotaped speech, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on Ukrainians to keep up the resistance. He promised that the invaders would not have “a moment of peace” and described the Russian soldiers as “confused children who have been used.”
Moscow’s isolation deepened as most of the world lined up once morest it at the United Nations to demand that it withdraw from Ukraine. And the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court opened an investigation into possible war crimes.
The Russian economy is already taking a hit and “there might be a serious political crisis” if Russian President Vladimir Putin does not find a way to end the war quickly, Felgenhauer said.
“There is no real money to spend to fight this war,” he said, adding that if Putin and the army “They can’t finish this campaign very quickly and with a win, they’re in trouble.”
With fighting on multiple fronts across the country, the British Ministry of Defense indicated that Mariupol, a large city on the shores of the Sea of Azov, was surrounded by Russian forces, while another vital port, Kherson, a shipyard city on the Black Sea with 280,000 inhabitants, remained unclear.
The Ukrainian military said in its statement that Russian forces “did not achieve the main objective of capturing Mariupol” and did not mention Kherson.
Russian forces said they had taken full control of Kherson, which would make it the largest city taken so far. But a senior US defense official cast doubt on that.
“Our view is that Kherson is a hotly contested city,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Zelenskyy’s office told The Associated Press that it might not comment on the situation in Kherson while the fighting continued.
But the mayor of Kherson, Igor Kolykhaev, pointed out that Russian soldiers were in the city and went to the city hall. He said that he asked them not to shoot at civilians and to allow crews to collect dead bodies from the streets.
“We have no Ukrainian forces in the city, only civilians and people here who want to live,” he said in a statement posted on Facebook.
The mayor of Mariupol, Vadym Boychenko, commented that the attacks in that town had been relentless.
“We can’t even remove the wounded from the streets, from houses and apartments, as the shelling doesn’t stop,” he said, as quoted by the Interfax news agency.
Russia reported its military casualties for the first time since the invasion began last week, saying almost 500 of its soldiers have been killed and nearly 1,600 wounded. Ukraine did not disclose its own military losses, but reported that more than 2,000 civilians had been killed, a claim that might not be independently verified.