The Russian military has reportedly dropped more bombs and missiles on cities and towns. This makes the lives of ordinary people in Ukraine even worse. The children take refuge in the theater and wait in line for food. Such people are being killed. Now, the battle is entering its fourth week. Rescuers on Thursday began evacuating some survivors of a theater in the besieged port city of Mariupol. A day after the attack, the city mayor’s adviser said the building, which is believed to be home to hundreds of people, was badly damaged. The scale of the massacre is still unknown as Russian troops continue shelling the area. This hinders recovery efforts. Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman Lyudmila Denisova said the weapon used was a “high-powered aerial bomb.”
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Selensky has accused Russia of “deliberately dropping a huge bomb” on a Russian theater. The ceasefire talks between the Russians and the Ukrainians were expected to enter a fourth day on Thursday, but Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s increasingly harsh comments were tarnishing progress. According to British intelligence reports, the Russian military has made “little progress in land, sea and air in recent days” and that “heavy casualties” continue. Nevertheless, Russian forces took control of large parts of Ukraine, especially in the east and south.
Fighting in the skies over Kiev intensified on Thursday night as Ukrainian forces claimed to have shot down 10 Russian planes and missiles. The wreckage of a rocket tore through a residential multi-storey building, killing several people, officials said. The Pentagon estimates that 7,000 Russian troops have been killed in three weeks of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than the number of U.S. troops killed in 20 years. U.S. and European officials say the Biden administration will provide Ukraine with more high-tech defensive weapons that are easier to use and require less training against Russian tanks, armored vehicles and aircraft. The diplomat said the UN Security Council would convene an emergency meeting on Thursday afternoon to discuss the dire humanitarian situation in Ukraine and the plight of more than three million refugees.
A 68-year-old American man has been killed in a Russian attack in the northwestern city of Chernivtsi, Kiev, local authorities said Monday. Local police say James Whitney Hill was killed in a heavy artillery attack on unarmed civilians in the city. Anton Gershenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, later confirmed his identity. Chernihiv, an ancient city of about 300,000 inhabitants located directly on the Russian-occupied route from Belarus to the capital Kiev, was besieged by Russian troops. It has been under attack since the early days of the war, and last week, the mayor of the city posted a message online that the rising death toll in the fighting meant that Chernihiv had no place to bury the dead.
When the curfew in Kiev ended Thursday and a theater in the southeastern city of Mariupol was attacked, Western intelligence sources said that Russian forces were making very few moves to seize additional Ukrainian cities. Attacks on civilians are rampant. Residents of Kiev described a relatively quiet end to the 35 – hour curfew that ended Thursday morning, although a war broke out in the skies as Ukrainian air defense claimed that Russian planes would land. According to an analysis by the Washington think tank Institute for the Study of War, which monitors the Russian occupation, Russian troops did not launch an offensive into the northeastern Kiev on Wednesday.
In northeastern Kharkiv – the second largest city in Ukraine and the main center of Russia’s initial offensive – Ukrainian forces blocked Russian attempts to completely encircle the city, although shelling destroyed most of it. At least seven Russian helicopters were destroyed in an airstrike on the Black Sea port of Kerson, which is being retaliated by Ukrainian forces. The Institute for the Study of War said that the failure of the Russians to land the Ukrainian air force probably slowed down their operations to the city of Mykolayiv. This is the main goal of their attempt to capture more parts of southern Ukraine.
But the number of civilians against them is growing. Governor Vyacheslav Chavez told Ukrainian news agencies on Wednesday that 53 bodies had been brought to the morgue in Chernihiv, a city northeastern Kiev, which had been surrounded by Russian troops for days. The details of how these people died were not immediately known. More than a dozen people were killed in a shelling in Chernihiv on Wednesday, the regional governor said. According to a Ukrainian news agency and the US embassy in Kiev, they were queuing for food.
On Wednesday, the Institute for the Study of War said that the Russian military had secured more territory north of the city of Mariupol in Donetsk, an area that is fully claimed. If captured by Russia, Mariupol will be a strategic city, with Russian-backed separatist enclaves located in the territory connecting the southern peninsula of Crimea, which was occupied by Russia in 2014, including Donetsk. Russian troops have been besieging the city for weeks, killing one of Ukraine’s deadliest terrorists. On Wednesday, there was an attack on a theater where hundreds of people had taken refuge, and on Thursday morning rescuers pulled some survivors out of the rubble. The extent of the massacre was not immediately known.