KYIV, Ukraine — Russian forces on Sunday doubled strikes against strategic targets across Ukraine, with fierce fighting reported around the capital Kiev amid signs that the besieged city of Mariupol was about to fall.
As the conflict entered its second month, Russian forces have largely failed in their first objective of capturing the largest cities, limiting direct targets to the sieges of the southern port city of Mariupol and the strategically located city of Chernihiv to the north.
Air-raid sirens blared in Kiev during the day, but otherwise the city remained calm, lending some credence to the Russian Defense Ministry’s recent claim that it was turning its attention away from Kiev to focus on the eastern front. Some Russian units withdrew to Belarus in the north to regroup and re-equip, according to the Ukrainian army, but heavy Russian artillery attacks continued around Chernihiv, northeast of Kiev.
Seven people, including two children, died in artillery fire in Kharkov, in northeastern Ukraine, when Russian forces attempted to subdue the city near the border, Ukrainian news media reported. And missiles hit a fuel depot in western Ukraine as Russia continued to use airstrikes to disrupt supply lines to Ukrainian troops.
The top officer of Ukraine’s military intelligence suggested that Russia shifted its military focus to the south and east, possibly trying to divide Ukraine between occupied and unoccupied territories.
“In fact, this is an attempt to create North and South Korea in Ukraine,” said Brig. Gene. Kyrylo Budanov, the head of the intelligence division of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.
Fighting across the country showed that Russian forces were working to consolidate their positions in key spots north of Kiev and resisting Ukrainian attempts to break their hold there, while fully concentrating on seizing control of Mariupol . After weeks of siege in the port city, Ukrainian soldiers and civilians trapped there faced increasingly dire conditions, without food and water, forcing people to use untreated sewage to survive.
Western military analysts and Ukrainian officials have repeatedly stressed that the Russian armed forces have suffered heavy casualties and have been thwarted in their primary objectives of taking control of the country’s key cities, including Kiev. Struggling with problems in their supply lines, Russian troops must move slowly and focus on one target at a time, said Jack Watling, a research associate and land warfare specialist at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute.
Yet, despite their successes in ambushing and stopping Russian units across the country, Ukrainian forces have failed to undo Russian gains in any significant way, he added.
In an interview with Russian journalists on Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russian troops had entered parts of Mariupol and that he told Ukrainian soldiers still standing there that they could leave the city to save their own lives.
“I speak to them twice a day,” he said. ‘I said to them, ‘If you think you have to get out and it’s okay, that you can survive, then do it. I understand.'”
He added that the officers refused to go because they did not want to leave dead and wounded comrades and civilians. He made the comments in an interview with some independent journalists that was published on the YouTube channel Zygar.
Mr Watling said he did not expect Ukrainian troops to hold Mariupol for more than a few days.
“They ran out of water, they ran out of food a while ago,” he said. “Depleted troops on sewage – you can’t fight that for long.”
He added that he expected an uprising in the city to continue after it fell.
As the war progressed, Ukraine’s physical toll became more and more apparent. Last Thursday, an estimated $63 billion worth of Ukrainian infrastructure was damaged or destroyed, the Ukrainian parliament said in a Twitter post on Sunday.
The losses include more than 4,400 residential buildings, 138 healthcare facilities, eight civilian airports and 378 educational institutions. The cost was calculated by the Kyiv School of Economics.
After a month of intense fighting near Kiev, some Russian military units withdrew to Belarus to regroup and traveled through the Chernobyl exclusion zone, the Ukrainian army said.
“These measures are being taken to rotate units that have suffered significant losses, reinforce existing groups, replenish food, fuel and ammunition and evacuate wounded and sick soldiers,” the army said in a statement.
It also said that the Russian military used the site of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor for logistics. Russian forces have blocked the town of Slavutich, which is close to Chernobyl station, and have escalated attacks on Chernihiv in an apparent effort to consolidate a control group north of the capital.
Ukraine’s chief negotiator in peace talks with Russia said a new round of negotiations will begin this week, starting Monday in Turkey, a NATO member that has used President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s good relations with both Russia and Ukraine to broker a deal. solution to the conflict. But Turkish officials have admitted that an agreement between the two sides remains remote.
Mr Budanov, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, predicted that the Ukrainian army would repel Russian troops if the fighting turned into an all-out guerrilla war.
“The season of a total Ukrainian guerrilla safari will start soon,” he said. “That leaves one relevant scenario for the Russians: how to survive.”
More than 1,100 civilians have been killed since the start of the war in Ukraine, including at least 99 children, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, in a report released Sunday that warned the real numbers could be “significantly higher”. can be. Another 1,790 civilians were injured, including 126 children, the report said.
With many parts of Ukraine still bogged down in the conflict, many dead and wounded cannot be counted, the United Nations said. The UN report omits the besieged city of Mariupol, where Russian forces this month stormed a theater that hundreds of civilians used as a bomb shelter, killing some 300 people, according to local officials.
When President Biden returned home from a visit with NATO allies in Europe and with Ukrainian refugees in Poland, President Zelensky urged him and other Western leaders to give Ukraine tanks, planes and missiles to repel Russian troops. to ward off.
“Ukraine cannot shoot down Russian missiles with shotguns, with machine guns,” he said. “And it is impossible to break through the blockade in Mariupol without enough tanks, other armored vehicles and, of course, aircraft.”
“Thousands of people – civilians, civilians dying there in the blockade – know that,” he added. “The United States knows it. All European politicians know it. We’ve told everyone.”
Mr Zelensky’s comments came as US officials on Sunday scrambled to make it clear that the United States has no policy of regime change in Russia, after Mr Biden said at the end of a speech in Poland on Saturday that the Russian leader, Vladimir V. Putin “cannot stay in power.”
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said the president simply meant that Mr Putin could not be “authorized to wage war” against Ukraine or anywhere else.
French and British officials distanced themselves from Mr Biden’s comments. When asked about them in an interview on Sunday, French President Emmanuel Macron said he would not use such language, adding that there should be no escalation – in words or deeds.
Reporting contributed by Ivan Nechepurenko from Istanbul, Maria Varenikova from Kyiv, Marc Santora from Krakow, Poland, Austin Ramzy from Hong Kong and Valerie Hopkins from Lviv, Ukraine. Maria Abi-Habib also reported.