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Residents of Kherson awake to Russian tanks as Moscow claims to have seized strategic city
Ukraine invasion: Russian forces capture city of Kherson, a strategic gain for Moscow
- Strategic port city near the Black Sea is the first significant city to fall into Moscow’s hands
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on Ukrainians to keep up the resistance
Russian forces have taken the Black Sea city of Kherson in southern Ukraine, a significant victory for Moscow after a string of military setbacks.
The battlefield gain, confirmed by local Ukrainian officials late Wednesday, came as Ukraine’s second city Kharkiv continued to come under severe Russian shelling, prompting comparisons to the massacres of civilians in Sarajevo in the 1990s.
Russian forces also reportedly surrounded Mariupol, a strategic port on the Sea of Azov, as the invasion entered its eighth day on Thursday. Another key Ukrainian port, Berdiansk, has already been seized by Russian troops.
However, the huge armoured column threatening the capital Kyiv appeared stalled outside the capital, according to US officials.
Moscow’s isolation deepened, meanwhile, when most of the world lined up against it at the United Nations to demand it withdraw from Ukraine. And the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court opened an investigation into possible war crimes.
Russia reported its military casualties for the first time since the invasion began last week, saying nearly 500 of its troops have been killed and almost 1,600 wounded.
Ukraine did not disclose its own military losses but said more than 2,000 civilians have died, a claim that could not be independently verified.
In a video address to the nation early Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky gave an upbeat assessment of the war and said the Russian death toll had reached about 9,000.
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Zelensky called on Ukrainians to keep up the resistance. He vowed that Russian forces would have “not one quiet moment” and described Russian soldiers as “confused children who have been used”.
“We are a people who in a week have destroyed the plans of the enemy,” he said. “They will have no peace here. They will have no food. They will have here not one quiet moment.”
Zelensky didn’t comment on whether the Russians have seized several cities, including the Black Sea port of Kherson.
With fighting going on multiple fronts across the country, Ukrainian officials late Wednesday confirmed that Russian troops had captured the southern provincial capital.
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“The (Russian) occupiers are in all parts of the city and are very dangerous,” Gennady Lakhuta, head of the regional administration, wrote on messaging service Telegram.
Russia’s defence ministry said earlier Wednesday it had captured Kherson, the first significant city to fall into Moscow’s hands. Kherson, a city of around 250,000 people, is strategically placed where the Dnipro River flows into the Black Sea.
Russian control there would also make it harder for Ukrainian forces to shift personnel and supplies between the east and the west.
Kherson Mayor Igor Kolykhayev said he was in talks with “armed guests” after a three-day siege left the city short of food and medicine, and struggling to collect and bury its dead.
He had “made no promises” to the invading forces, but agreed to a night curfew and restrictions on car traffic.
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“So far so good. The flag flying above us is Ukrainian. And for it to stay that way, these requirements must be met,” he said in a Facebook post.
Britain’s Defence Ministry said Mariupol, a large city on the Azov Sea, was encircled by Russian forces. Mariupol sits between Russian-controlled Crimea and breakaway Donbas republics.
Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko said the attacks there had been relentless.
“We cannot even take the wounded from the streets, from houses and apartments today, since the shelling does not stop,” he was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying.
Meanwhile, a senior US defence official said the immense column of hundreds of tanks and other vehicles appeared to be stalled roughly 25km (16 miles) from Kyiv and had made no real progress in the last couple of days.
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The convoy, which earlier in the week had seemed poised to launch an assault on the capital, has been plagued with fuel and food shortages and has faced fierce Ukrainian resistance, the official said.
On the far edges of Kyiv, volunteer fighters well into their 60s manned a checkpoint to try to block the Russian advance.
Russia’s shift to more aggressive artillery and aerial attacks on urban centres is leading to a tempering of optimism over Ukraine’s ability to sustain its so far effective organised resistance against a vastly superior force.
“We are now in for the long haul and Russia is reorganising itself to ensure that it wins this war,” according to Keir Giles, senior consulting fellow for the Russia and Eurasia programme at Chatham House, who spoke on a webinar. “So the implications of the Russian way of war is that we need to prepare now for humanitarian catastrophe.”
After days of intense fighting, hundreds of civilians have been killed, while around one million people have fled Ukraine since the invasion began, triggering punishing Western sanctions intended to cripple Russia’s economy.
A second round of talks aimed at ending the fighting was expected Thursday, but there appeared to be little common ground between the two sides.
Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Reuters, dpa, Bloomberg
