The capital has been preparing for days for the Russian assault from the northwest and east of the city, for which the authorities decreed a new 36-hour curfew that will last until Wednesday morning.
Sandbags to block some accesses, anti-aircraft sirens and detonations in the distance are already part of the panorama of the city, emptied with a large part of its 3.5 million inhabitants displaced by the invasion that began on February 24.
All shops are closed complying with the curfew, the third since the start of the war, and the order is for everyone to stay home and go down to the “shelters as soon as the sirens start to sound”, according to the mayor and former boxing world champion Vitali Klitschko, quoted by the AFP news agency.
At least one person was killed today in a drone attack on a scientific institute in Kyiv, this Tuesday, official sources indicated.
Military rescuers removed a body covered with a plastic sheet from the seven-story building that houses the Institute of Superhard Materials, in the northwest of the capital.
The situation has been worse for weeks in Mariupol, in the southeast, where some 350,000 people are trapped without water or electricity.
The city is a key plaza because it would serve as a bridge for Russia between forces in Crimea and Moscow-controlled territories to the north and east.
For days there have been humanitarian corridors to try to evacuate the besieged population, but the situation remains desperate and the town was described by Human Rights Watch as “a frozen hell full of corpses and destroyed buildings.”
Two “super-powerful bombs” fell on the city, local authorities said, without providing any immediate results.
According to the Ukrainian government, the outlook is also critical in Kherson, in the south of the country and occupied by Russian soldiers, where nearly 300,000 people are about to run out of food and medicine.
“The humanitarian situation is rapidly deteriorating. The city is critically short of food and medical supplies due to the siege. Newborns, who lack child nutrition and hygiene products, and seriously ill patients constitute the population at special risk,” he said in a statement the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry.
The United Nations reported that it has already confirmed the death of 953 civilians since the start of the war, 78 of them children.although the real figure would be “considerably higher” due to the delay in verification and the lack of data from key areas such as Mariupol.
On the other hand, more than 3.5 million people have fled Ukraine since the invasion, according to figures from the UN refugee agency for refugees (UNHCR), in an exodus that threatens to become the worst crisis in Europe since World War II.
Despite this scenario and the incessant Russian bombardment, the US reading is that Ukraine has begun to regain ground in some areas of the battlefield.
This was reported in statements to the CNN news network by Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, who stressed that the Ukrainian resistance, backed by millions of dollars in military aid granted by Western powers, has been unexpectedly fierce, and now the Ukrainians are repositioning themselves “in some places and sometimes on the offensive.”
The possible use of nuclear weapons is a ghost that has been stirring since the beginning of the conflict and Russia’s response today did not silence the alarms: the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, indicated that they will only be used in the event of a “threat to the existence ” from the country.
“We have a concept of national security that is in the public domain and you can read all the reasons why nuclear weapons could be used. That is, if there is a threat to the existence of the country, then they can be used, according to our concept,” the spokesman said in an interview with CNN.
In the diplomatic field, the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, said today that he sees “elements of progress” on key issues in the conflict and believes there is “enough on the table” to cease hostilities.
“From my contact with various actors, elements of diplomatic progress are emerging on several key issues. There is enough on the table to cease hostilities now and negotiate seriously,” Guterres said.quoted by the Sputnik news agency.
One of the actors who offered himself as a mediator is Pope Francis, who today communicated by telephone with the President of Ukraine, Volodimir Zelenski, to address the situation in the country.
“New visible gesture of support from Pope Francis: a few minutes ago the Pope called President Zelensky and they had a very promising conversation,” Ukraine’s ambassador to the Holy See, Andriy Yurash, said on his Twitter account.
Papal spokesman Matteo Bruni confirmed the call before a consultation of accredited media in the Vatican, including Télam, but refused to reveal details of the content.
Zelensky also addressed the Italian Parliament in a message in which he called for stronger sanctions against Russian businessmen who spend their vacations in Italy, warned about food shortages and the migratory crisis that the war can unleash, and assured that the “ultimate goal “of the Kremlin is Europe.
“Don’t be the vacation spot for those people,” the president launched to the parliamentarians by videoconference, recalling that the peninsula is one of the destinations of the Russian oligarchy, which owns luxury mansions in some of the most beautiful locations in the country. , from Tuscany to the island of Sardinia.
“We must freeze their properties, their accounts, their yachts, from the ship ‘Scheherazade’ to the smallest. We must freeze the assets of all those who have the power to make decisions in Russia,” he cried.
The United States and its European allies will announce more sanctions against Russia on Thursday and the tightening of the measures already adopted for the invasion, which is a month old that day, announced the National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan.
These measures will be announced in the framework of the visit that US President Joe Biden will make to Europe. On Thursday, the president will participate in an extraordinary NATO summit and a G7 meeting in Brussels, while on Friday he will visit Poland.
Given this, Moscow announced the creation of an operational center to fight against the sanctions imposed by much of the world.
“The wave of sanctions that we are experiencing now is the most systematic, the deepest. We are analyzing which areas of the joint activity of the defense industry and the Ministry of Defense will be affected. To this end, within the framework of the Service was created an operational center”, announced the deputy director of the Service, Mijaíl Babich, before the Russian parliament.
Source: Ambito
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