Fighting reaches Kyiv suburbs as Russian invasion of Ukraine intensifies
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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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 the 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”.
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