Kyiv residents evacuate as Russian troops close in
RUSSIAN forces appeared to have made progress yesterday from northeast Ukraine in their slow fight to reach the capital Kyiv, while tanks and artillery pounded places already under siege with shelling so heavy it prevented residents of one city from burying the growing number of dead.
In Mariupol, unceasing barrages have thwarted repeated attempts to bring in food and water and to evacuate trapped civilians. The city’s death toll passed 1,500 in 12 days of attack alone, the mayor’s office said, and a strike on a maternity hospital in the city of 446,000 earlier this week killed three people.
Continued shelling forced crews to stop digging trenches for mass graves, so the “dead aren’t even being buried”, the mayor said.
Russian forces have hit more than a dozen hospitals since they invaded
Ukraine on
February 24, according to the
World Health Organisation.
Ukrainian officials reported yesterday that heavy artillery had damaged a cancer hospital and several residential buildings in Mykolaiv, a city 300 miles west of Mariupol. The hospital’s head doctor, Maksim Beznosenko, said several hundred patients were in the facility during the attack but no-one was killed.
The invading Russian forces have struggled far more than expected against determined Ukrainian fighters, but Moscow’s stronger military threatens to grind down the defending forces, despite a flow of weapons and other assistance from the West for Ukraine’s westward-looking, democratically elected government.
The conflict has already sent 2.5 million people fleeing the country. Thousands of soldiers on both sides are believed to have been killed along with many Ukrainian civilians.
The Kremlin’s forces appeared to be trying to regroup and regain momentum after encountering heavy losses and tough resistance over the past two weeks.
They were blockading Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, even as efforts have been made to create new
humanitarian corridors around it and other urban centres so aid can get in and residents can get out.
Ukraine’s emergency services reported on Saturday that the bodies of two women, a man and two children had been pulled from an apartment building struck by shelling in the city.
The Russians also stepped up attacks on Mykolaiv, 290 miles south of Kyiv, in an attempt to encircle the city.
In a multi-front attack on the capital, the Russians’ push from the north-east appeared to be advancing.