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KYIV — Russian forces advanced on Kyiv from both flanks on Thursday as heavy fighting raged across Ukraine, giving President Vladimir Putin an opening to push for an unpalatable peace deal that would force Ukraine to disarm and drop its NATO aspirations.
In the capital, a POLITICO reporter said air-raid sirens had sounded and that the authorities had warned of potential bombing.
After an early morning missile barrage, Ukraine’s military said it had been locked in battles nationwide to counter a three-pronged offensive. Russian troops not only launched a tank offensive through the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine but also attacked from Belarus in the north, heading toward Kyiv, and from the Crimean peninsula to the south.
Regional authorities announced that the Russians had seized the city of Sumy to the east of Kyiv and were fighting Ukrainian troops on the road toward the capital around the city of Konotop.
Compounding the Ukrainian government’s problems, officials also reported heavy fighting around Hostomel just to the northwest of Kyiv, where video footage earlier in the day showed Russian helicopters swooping in. A CNN reporter at Hostomel found Russian airborne troops securing the airfield perimeter.
By early evening, Russian troops had taken the Chernobyl nuclear power station, about 130 kilometers north of Kyiv, after several hours of fighting. And Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s office said the battle was ongoing near Hostomel, less than 10 kilometers from Kyiv city limits.
The big strategic question is whether Putin’s goal in Kyiv is to topple the Ukrainian government and replace it with one allied to him. For now, Zelenskiy remains in the capital, working on the country’s defense with international allies, his office said. Putin himself says he regards Ukraine as having committed a coup d’état with its Maidan Revolution of 2014, a popular uprising that ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, who was trying to pull the country back from closer alignment with the EU.
Ukraine is hitting back hard at suggestions from Moscow that its troops are buckling in the face of Putin’s onslaught. The government retorts that its soldiers are driving back assaults, shooting down aircraft and knocking out Russian tanks across the front lines. They also accuse the Russians of lying about not hitting civilian targets.
The balance of military hardware is, however, stacked against the defenders. The Kyiv City Council has warned that airstrikes could be imminent and earlier in the day Vitaly Klitschko, mayor of Kyiv and former heavyweight boxing champion, warned that citizens should have an emergency suitcase ready to go and take shelter. Klitschko also announced a 10 p.m. curfew.
Outside an apartment block in central Kyiv, a group of neighbors waited for the adjacent building to open its underground parking lot to use as a bomb shelter. Although a map of shelters has been available online for weeks, the group, like many others, left it until very late to work out their options. Tatiana Velinska only checked out the nearest supposed shelter at 9 a.m., four hours after the first explosion was heard.
She discovered it was a shop, which was locked up. Eventually, she called the police and was advised to try the underground parking lot.
Velinska said she had stocked up on some extra food and water a week ago for herself and her two children, 10 and eight. “Our relatives suggested that we leave Kyiv, but we trusted our president that everything would be alright,” she said. “It’s a defensive mechanism, you don’t want to believe it till the last minute.”
Seeking to capitalize from his pressure on Kyiv, Putin is already pushing to ram home a peace settlement that would impose highly toxic terms on Zelenskiy, insisting on both Ukrainian neutrality and disarmament.
Making plain the deal was entirely on Putin’s terms, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “The president formulated his vision of what we would expect from Ukraine.”
Rather than being bullied into a deal that would force Ukraine to give up its NATO aspirations and drop its trajectory toward closer alignment with the democratic EU, the government is calling for more weapons so that it can fight on.
Since morning, when every second person seemed to be carrying a bag or wheeling a suitcase, Kyiv streets are getting quieter by the minute as those who can leave the city, while others hunker down in their homes.
Officials are advising people to stay put rather than join the stand-still traffic jams at exits from the city. Public transport is still running, including the metro, which is now free. But there is little sign of open panic, and minimal police presence.
In central Kyiv, people waited in orderly queues at pharmacies and at ATMs, where Ukrainian banks have put a limit on card withdrawals — 3,000 hryvnia, or just more than $100, from the main state bank Privat. Online banks like Monobank have been frozen since morning, users said.
Most shops, other than corner stores and supermarkets, are closed, but there is no obvious rush for food items. And for some, life seems to be going on almost as normal, with a few dog walkers out and even a group of workmen fixing traffic bollards. In one queue outside a pharmacy, a young couple checked their phones for the latest news. As they played a video of a plane being shot down in east Ukraine, others crowded around to watch.
Many people are trying to decide whether to leave tonight — weighing the risks of getting caught under shelling in traffic, which remains at a standstill on the main road west, versus remaining in Kyiv for what promises to be a long night.
“Where am I supposed to go?” said one woman in her 50s. She said she was from Chernihiv Oblast, north of Kyiv toward the Belarusian border, where Russian forces had crossed into Ukraine. “So it would mean just going towards the Russians.”
Victor Jack and Douglas Busvine contributed reporting.
Source: Politico
