Russia’s military forces yesterday kept up their punishing campaign to capture Ukraine’s capital with fighting and artillery fire in Kyiv’s suburbs, after an airstrike on a military base near the Polish border brought the war dangerously close to NATO’s doorstep.
As Russian munitions pounded Ukraine for a 19th day, a new round of talks between Russian and Ukrainian officials raised hopes for progress in evacuating civilians from besieged Ukrainian cities, and getting emergency supplies to areas without enough food, water and medicine.
Air raid alerts sounded in cities and towns nationwide overnight, from near the Russian border in the east to the Carpathian Mountains in the west, as fighting continued on the outskirts of Kyiv.
Photo: AFP
Ukrainian officials said Russian forces shelled several suburbs of the capital, a major political and strategic target for their invasion.
Ukrainian authorities said two people died and seven were injured after Russian forces struck an airplane factory in Kyiv, sparking a large fire.
The Antonov factory is Ukraine’s largest aircraft manufacturing plant and is best known for producing many of the world’s biggest cargo planes.
Russian artillery fire also hit a nine-story apartment building in the northern Obolonskyi District of the city, killing two more people, authorities said.
Firefighters worked to rescue survivors, painstakingly carrying an injured woman on a stretcher away from the blackened and still smoking building.
A town councilor for Brovary, east of Kyiv, was killed in fighting there, officials said.
Shells also fell on the Kyiv suburbs of Irpin, Bucha and Hostomel, which have seen some of the worst fighting in Russia’s stalled attempt to take the capital, local officials said.
Airstrikes were reported across the nation, including the southern city of Mykolaiv and the northern city of Chernihiv, where heat was knocked out to most of the town. Explosions also rang out overnight around the Russian-occupied Black Sea port of Kherson.
In the eastern city of Kharkiv, firefighters doused the remains of a four-story residential building on a street of apartments and shops. Ukrainian emergency services said a strike hit the building, leaving smoldering piles of wood and metal. It was unclear whether there were casualties.
The surrounded southern city of Mariupol, where the war has produced some of the greatest human suffering, remained cut off despite earlier talks on creating aid or evacuation convoys.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said suffering in Mariupol was “simply immense,” and that hundreds of thousands of people faced extreme shortages of food, water and medicine.
“Dead bodies, of civilians and combatants, remain trapped under the rubble or lying in the open where they fell,” the Red Cross said in a statement.
A pregnant woman who became a symbol of Ukraine’s suffering when she was photographed being carried from a bombed maternity hospital in Mariupol has died along with her baby, The Associated Press has learned.
Images of the woman being rushed to an ambulance on a stretcher had circled the world, epitomizing the horror of an attack on humanity’s most innocent.
Ukraine announced plans for new humanitarian aid and evacuation corridors yesterday, although ongoing shelling caused similar efforts to fail in the past week, including on Sunday.
The UN has recorded at least 596 civilian deaths since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, though it believes the true toll is much higher. Millions more people have fled their homes, with more than 2.8 million crossing into Poland and other neighboring nations in what the UN refugee agency has called Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since World War II.
A fourth round of high-level discussions between Ukrainian and Russian officials was set to take place by videoconference yesterday, the first negotiations in a week, Ukrainian presidential aide Mykhailo Podolyak said.
“Communication is being held, yet it’s hard,” Podolyak wrote on Twitter.
Earlier, he wrote that negotiators would discuss “peace, ceasefire, immediate withdrawal of troops & security guarantees.”
Previous rounds were held in person on the border with Belarus and failed to produce a breakthrough.
The war expanded on Sunday when Russian missiles pounded a military training base in western Ukraine that previously served as a crucial hub for cooperation between Ukraine and NATO.
The attack killed 35 people, Ukrainian officials said, and the base’s proximity to the border with Poland raised concerns that NATO could be drawn into the the largest land conflict in Europe since World War II.
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