Explosions seen inside Kyiv as Ukrainians flee the capital

Fighting reaches Kyiv suburbs as Russian invasion of Ukraine intensifies

 

Air raid sirens wail over capital and heavy gunfire and explosions heard in residential district

 

Emma Graham-Harrison and Luke Harding in Kyiv, Daniel Boffey in Brussels, Elias Visontay and Jon Henley

Fri 25 Feb 2022 11.21 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/25/ukraine-invasion-explosions-in-kyiv-as-uk-reports-fierce-resistance-across-the-nation

 

Fighting has reached the northern suburbs of Kyiv after a night of missile attacks on the Ukrainian capital to prepare for a major Russian assault, as president Volodymyr Zelenskiy pleaded for more international help and tougher sanctions.

 

Air raid sirens wailed over the city of three million people and heavy gunfire and explosions were heard in a residential district on Friday morning. Ukrainian officials warned that Russian military vehicles were approaching the city from the north-west.

 

A day after the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, launched an invasion that shocked the world, a senior Ukrainian official said Russian forces would enter the city limits later in the day, adding that Ukrainian troops were defending positions on four fronts.

 

Pre-dawn blasts in Kyiv set off a second day of violence after Putin on Thursday defied western warnings to unleash the biggest attack on a European state since the second world war. It has so far claimed at least 150 lives and displaced more than 100,000.

 

“Horrific Russian rocket strikes on Kyiv,” Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, tweeted. “Last time our capital experienced anything like this was in 1941 when it was attacked by Nazi Germany. Ukraine defeated that evil and will defeat this one.”

 

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said Moscow was ready for talks if Ukraine’s military surrendered, as he insisted the invading forces were seeking to free the country from “oppression” and would not seek to occupy it.

 

The Ukrainian defence ministry said Russian forces had entered the Obolonskyi district of Kyiv, about six miles from the centre of the city. In a statement posted online, it advised residents to report the movements of Russian troops and “prepare molotov cocktails in order to neutralise the enemy”.

 

Cleaning broken glass from her room, one Kyiv resident, Oxana Gulenko, said: “How we can live through it in our time? What should we think. Putin should be burnt in hell along with his whole family.”

 

Witnesses said loud explosions could also be heard in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-biggest city, close to Russia’s border, while air raid sirens sounded over Lviv in the west. A resident told the Guardian the eastern city of Sumy had been taken.

 

Ukrainian officials said a Russian aircraft had been shot down and crashed into a building in Kyiv overnight, setting it ablaze. An unverified recording showed a Russian warship ordering a Ukrainian Black Sea outpost to surrender. The Ukrainians reply: “Russian warship, go fuck yourself.”

 

 

In the Ukrainian village of Starognativka near the frontline where separatists have faced off against Kyiv’s forces for years, a local official, Volodymyr Veselkin, said missiles had been raining down all morning and the power was out. “They are trying to wipe the village off the face of the earth,” he said.

 

The UN’s refugee agency said some 100,000 people were already displaced inside Ukraine, while thousands of others fled across the border. Streams of people in cars and on foot were seen crossing into Hungary, Poland and Romania at border points where queues were lasting up to 15 hours.

 

Zelenskiy said in a televised address early on Friday that Putin was targeting civilian as well as military sites. “They say that civilian objects are not a target for them. It is a lie; they do not distinguish in which areas to operate,” he said, vowing to continue defending his country.

 

The president, who also criticised world leaders for “watching from afar”, spoke after large explosions were heard in the capital, and after a warning from US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, that “all evidence suggests that Russia intends to encircle and threaten” the city. Zelenskiy has vowed to stay in the capital.

 

The UK defence secretary, Ben Wallace, has said it is the view of British intelligence that Russia intends to invade the whole of Ukraine, but that its army failed to deliver on the first day of its invasion.

 

The international criminal court said on Friday it might investigate possible war crimes, though did not provide any further details. Putin says Ukraine is an illegitimate state carved out of Russia, although his ultimate aims remain obscure.

 

Blinken told a meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe on Thursday that the US believed Moscow had “developed plans to inflict widespread human rights abuses – and potentially worse – on the Ukrainian people”.

 

Putin at the Kremlin on Thursday. The Czech president Miloš Zeman denounced Putin a ‘madman’ after the invasion.

 

Ukraine announced it had lost control of the Chernobyl nuclear site near the country’s northern border with Belarus hours after Russian troops began an invasion of its neighbour on Thursday, and the White House said it was “outraged” by credible reports that Russian forces were holding facility staff there hostage.

 

The International Atomic Energy Agency said it was following the situation “with grave concern” and appealed for maximum restraint to avoid any action that might put Ukraine’s nuclear facilities at risk.

 

In Russia, thousands of people defied tough anti-protest legislation to stage anti-war rallies across the country. OVD-Info, which monitors arrests at opposition protests, said that more than 1,800 people in 59 cities had been detained.

 

The west scrambled to respond to Putin’s aggression with a range of new sanctions against Moscow, with the US also announcing it would send 7,000 more troops to Germany to shore up Nato’s eastern borders. But even after the invasion there were divisions on the strength of the response.

 

The EU faced furious remonstrations from Kyiv after Europe’s leaders held back from imposing the potentially most damaging sanction on Russia: blocking Russia from the international payments system through which it receives foreign currency.

 

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said European and US politicians would have “blood on their hands” if they failed to impose the heaviest toll on Moscow by cutting Russia from the Swift payments system. France’s finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, said cutting Russia off from Swift was “a very last resort”,

 

The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said the EU was united after discussions of the five-pillar sanctions package targeting the financial, energy, transport and export industries and visa controls.

 

She said: “Today’s events are a watershed moment for Europe. Bombs are falling on innocent women, men and children. They fear for their lives and many are dying. All of this happens in 2022 – in the very heart of Europe. President Putin chose to bring back war to Europe.

 

“Let me stress that these events, indeed, mark the beginning of a new era. We must be very clear in our analysis: Putin is trying to subjugate a friendly European country. And he is trying to redraw the maps of Europe by force. He must, and he will, fail.”

 

Leaders of the 30 Nato allied nations will meet on Friday, the US president, Joe Biden, confirmed, as they come under pressure to go further than the two rounds of sanctions already announced, after what the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, described as a “dark day in the history of our continent”.

 

The United Nations security council will also vote on Friday on a draft resolution condemning Russia’s invasion and requiring Moscow’s immediate withdrawal. However, Moscow can veto the measure, and it was unclear how China, which has rejected calling Russia’s move an invasion, would vote.