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Kyiv is under siege, says Ukraine as fighting rages
Russian strikes destroyed the airport in the town of Vasylkiv on Saturday morning, about 40km south of Kyiv, while an oil depot was also hit and caught fire, an official said.
Russian forces pounding the port city of Mariupol shelled a mosque that was sheltering more than 80 people, including children, the Ukrainian government said Saturday, even as fighting raged on the outskirts of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv.
Russian strikes destroyed the airport in the town of Vasylkiv on Saturday morning, about 40km south of Kyiv, while an oil depot was also hit and caught fire, an official said.
“They are bombing it (Mariupol) 24 hours a day, launching missiles. It is hatred. They kill children,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said during a video address.
The northwest suburbs of the capital, including Irpin and Bucha, have already endured days of heavy bombardment while Russian armoured vehicles are advancing on the northeastern edge. Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak on Friday called it a “city under siege”, while mayor Vitali Klitschko said Saturday Kyiv was reinforcing defences and stockpiling food and medicine.
France and Germany urged Russia’s Vladimir Putin Saturday to end the deadly days-long siege of the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, the French presidency said after three-way talks. “The situation is very difficult and humanly intolerable” in Mariupol, an official in the Elysee presidential palace said, after what it termed a “very frank and difficult discussion” with the Russian leader.
An Associated Press journalist in Mariupol witnessed tanks firing on a nine-story apartment building and was with a group of hospital workers who came under sniper fire on Friday. A worker shot in the hip survived, but conditions in the hospital were deteriorating: electricity was reserved for operating tables, and people with nowhere else to go lined the hallways.
Ukraine’s military said on Saturday that Russian forces captured Mariupol’s eastern outskirts, tightening the armed squeeze on the strategic port. Taking Mariupol and other ports on the Azov Sea could allow Russia to establish a land corridor to Crimea, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014.
Zelensky encouraged his people to keep up their resistance, which many analysts said has prevented the rapid offensive and military victory the Kremlin likely expected while planning to invade Russia’s ex-Soviet neighbor. “The fact that the whole Ukrainian people resist these invaders has already gone down in history, but we do not have the right to let up our defense, no matter how difficult it may be for us,” he said.
Zelensky again deplored NATO’s refusal to declare a no-fly zone over Ukraine and said Ukraine has sought ways to procure air defense assets, though he didn’t elaborate.
In multiple areas around the capital, artillery barrages sent residents scurrying for shelter as air raid sirens wailed. As artillery pounded Kyiv’s northwestern outskirts, black and white columns of smoke rose southwest of the capital after a strike on an ammunition depot in the town of Vasylkiv caused hundreds of small explosions. A frozen food warehouse just outside the capital also was struck in an apparent effort to target Kyiv’s food supply.
Ukraine’s military and volunteer forces have been preparing for an all-out assault. Klitschko said on Thursday that about 2 million people, half the metropolitan area’s inhabitants, had left and that “every street, every house … is being fortified.”
US President Joe Biden has said he has moved 12,000 troops along the borders with Russia, such as Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Romania while asserting that Putin will not be victorious in the war he has waged against Ukraine.
Zelensky said on Saturday that Russia would need to carpet-bomb the Ukrainian capital and kill its residents to take the city. “They will come here only if they kill us all,” he said. “If that is their goal, let them come.”
Russia’s slow tightening of a noose around Kyiv and the bombardment of other cities mirror tactics that Russian forces have previously used in other campaigns, notably in Syria and Chechnya, to crush armed resistance.
