Desk Report
Publish: 26 Feb 2022, 10:11 pm
Ukrainian security forces guard a checkpoint on the edge of Kyiv, Ukraine, Feb 25, 2022. Ukraine’s military on Friday was waging a fierce battle to push Russian forces back from Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, a day after a vicious fight that littered the highway leading into the city with burned-out Russian troop carriers and at least one body, (Lynsey Addario/The New York Times)
The Ukrainian defense forces,
outmanned and outgunned, waged a ferocious resistance to the Russian invasion,
battling to keep control of the capital, Kyiv, and other cities around the
country.
The Ukrainian president,
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, posted a video on Twitter on Saturday, telling the public
not to believe false reports.
He was alive. Kyiv had not
fallen. Any reports of Ukraine laying down its arms was a lie, Zelenskyy said.
“I’m here. We are not putting
down any arms. We will protect our country because our weapons are our truth.
The truth is that this is our land, our country, our children, and we will
protect them all,” he said.
“That is it. That’s what I wanted
to tell you. Glory to Ukraine.”
His comments, released before 9
am, came as fighting intensified in Kyiv. What until three days ago had been a
thriving European metropolis has been transformed into a battle zone. Russian
troops pressed in from all directions.
There was intense street
fighting, and bursts of gunfire and explosions could be heard across the city,
including its heart, Maidan square, wherein 2014 Ukrainian protests led to the
toppling of a pro-Moscow government.
The Russian military has a decisive
edge in cyberwarfare, tanks, heavy weaponry, missiles, fighter planes and
warships. In sheer numbers, its military dwarfs that of Ukraine’s.
Russia has established attack
lines into three cities — Kyiv in the north, Kharkiv in the northeast and Kherson
in the south — and Ukrainian troops are fighting to hold all three. The
Pentagon reported late Friday that the Russians did not appear to be in control
of a single major population center. Significantly, the senior US defense
official said, Ukrainian command and control remain intact.
The Ukrainian government reported
hundreds of Russian soldiers have been killed in the war, along with scores of
their own soldiers, while the Russian ministry of defense issued a statement on
Saturday morning that made no mention of any casualties or anything about the
fight for Kyiv.
The Russian invasion started with
targeted airstrikes before dawn Thursday, but on the third day of the war,
bloody battles were often being waged in close quarters. Ukrainska Pravda, a
Ukrainian news site, citing eyewitnesses, reported combat 400 yards from Kyiv’s
city center, Maidan Square.
All Ukrainian men of fighting age
are being drafted into service, and tens of thousands are eagerly signing up.
Ukrainians were asked to make Molotov cocktails. And there were tearful scenes
at airports in western Ukraine as wives kissed their husbands goodbye before
they headed to the front.
The nation has rallied around its
president, Zelenskyy, a former comedian.
To Zelenskyy and other officials,
the objective of the Russian invasion of a neighboring country that posed no
military threat is to topple the government.
Zelenskyy has said that he is
“target No. 1.”
As battles were waged around the
city on Saturday morning, there were reports of clashes near the city’s train
station and along a central thoroughfare, Bohdan Khmelnitsky Street, leading
from Victory Square toward the city center, according to the witness accounts.
Along that street, closer to the city center, bursts of gunfire could be heard
through the night.
“We are stopping the horde, so
far as we can,” the secretary of the Ukrainian Security and Defense Council,
Oleksy Danilov, said around 7 am Saturday. “The situation is under control of
the Armed Forces of Ukraine and citizens of Kyiv.”
In dozens of interviews in the
tense hours before the invasion and in the days after, Ukrainians struggled to
understand how a country at peace so suddenly found itself at war. For many
Ukrainians, the answer was found in Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.
This is Putin’s war. But what
frightened people perhaps as much as the threat of missiles and bombs, was that
they did not know what he wanted.
The fear was evident in the drive
from Kyiv to a small village outside the city. Military convoys had replaced
families going on vacation or visiting friends. Where once Kyiv was known as a
city where the music played a touch too loud in its cafes, the incessant wail
of air raid sirens drowned out all joy.
The fear was evident in the faces
of the people seeking safety in western Ukraine after they emerged from
20-hour train rides in packed carriages that were kept pitch-black to avoid
being targeted by Russian rockets.
From Lviv in the west to Odessa
in the south, and Kharkiv and nearly all points in between, people huddled in
air raid shelters and lined up bank machines and stocked up on essentials.
While the Russians, for the
moment, were not in control of any city, it was only the first phase of a
conflict that could stretch into weeks or longer._
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