KYIV, Ukraine — With reports of a large-scale military convoy positioning itself into a firing posture around Kyiv, Russian forces widened their offensive in Ukraine on Friday, attacking more major cities while also pounding targets farther from the front line.
The intensified assault on the ground came even as the United States somewhat improbably insisted that diplomacy still had a role in the conflict and as Moscow pressed its propaganda war at the United Nations.
Early Friday, Russian warplanes conducted three airstrikes on Dnipro — Ukraine’s fourth-largest city, about 240 miles southeast of Kyiv — hitting a kindergarten, an apartment building and a two-story shoe factory, according to Ukraine’s State Emergency Service. The factory was still burning more than two hours after the attack, and at least one person was killed, the emergency service said.
Those strikes followed a bombing run targeting the Lutsk military airfield in the country’s northwest, the Interfax-Ukraine news agency said, quoting Yuriy Pohulyaiko, head of the military administration in the area. Pohulyaiko said two soldiers were killed and six others wounded.
Airstrikes also hit the airport in Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine, said Mayor Ruslan Martsynkiv.
“The enemy has struck at Frankivsk. There were explosions at our airport. Remain calm, the relevant services are working,” Martsynkiv wrote on his official Facebook page, urging residents to leave the area and not to spread photos and videos of the explosions.
And Russian forces continued their intense bombardment of the southeastern city of Mariupol on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, Mayor Vadym Boichenko said in a video message on Facebook. Mariupol was the site of the shelling and destruction earlier this week of a maternity hospital, prompting some Western officials, including Vice President Kamala Harris, to call for a war crimes investigation.
“Two days of hell, Armageddon,” Boichenko said, adding that the Russians were using Grad rockets and artillery on residential areas. “Every 30 minutes, airplanes fly over the city of Mariupol, attack residential areas, kill the civilian population — the elderly, women, children.”
Efforts to establish a humanitarian corridor to allow safe passage out for Mariupol’s civilians have repeatedly failed because of Russian fire, Ukraine says.
Despite the deadly risk of doing so, more than 2.5 million Ukrainians have now fled their country, the United Nations said. Most have gone to Poland, which has so far welcomed them but also is pleading for international aid in accommodating and processing them.
The main prize for Russia remains the capital, Kyiv, where satellite photography showed that a massive armored convoy, long stalled north of the city, has begun to split up and move into villages and forests, shifting artillery into firing positions.
Russian troops appeared Friday to be locking down part of the expanse of villages and towns northeast of Kyiv. In the town of Pryluky, about 80 miles east of Kyiv and once home to Ukraine’s largest airfield in the Soviet era, Ukrainian soldiers laid out mines on the road heading north out of the city. Russian troops, they said, were a scant 10 miles north of the town and 30 miles to the west, on the main highway leading to Kyiv.
The general staff said Russian troops had been halted in their efforts to take the northern city of Chernihiv by Ukraine’s recapture of the town of Baklanova Muraviika, which Russian troops could use as a staging post to move toward Kyiv.
Russian forces are also blockading Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city, and pushing their offensive in the south around Mykolaiv, Zaporizhzhia and Kryvyi Rih, the hometown of Ukraine’s defiant, besieged President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Friday that thousands of “volunteers” from all over the world, especially the Middle East, have asked to join the fight against Ukraine. Many are believed to be arriving from Syria, where Moscow long supported the brutal and ultimately successful campaign of President Bashar Assad to vanquish domestic opposition as well as the Islamic State terrorist group.
“We consider it right to respond positively to [the] requests, especially since these requests are not for money, but at the true desire of these people,” Shoigu said at a meeting of the Russian Security Council, according to the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti.
Russia also requested and was granted a meeting later Friday at the U.N. Security Council to discuss what it claims are “the military biological activities of the U.S. on the territory of Ukraine.” U.S. diplomats scoffed at the move, saying it was an attempt to “gaslight the world.”
“This is exactly the kind of false flag effort we have warned Russia might initiate to justify a biological or chemical weapons attack,” said Olivia Dalton, spokesperson for the U.S. delegation at the U.N.
The U.S. has flatly rejected Russian accusations that Ukraine is running chemical and biological labs with U.S. support.
In Moscow, the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin again floated the idea of negotiations with Ukraine despite several rounds of talks so far achieving next to nothing. Ukraine insists that Russia will accept nothing less than its surrender.
“No one rules out the possibility of a meeting between Putin and Zelenskyy,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday.
At the same time, Peskov said that “first, delegations and ministers need to do their part of the work to make sure that the presidents don’t meet just for the sake of the process and a conversation but hold a meeting to achieve results.”
But the U.S. was highly skeptical. State Department spokesman Ned Price said Russia so far is engaging in a “pretense of diplomacy” with no genuine interest in negotiating.
“Putin could choose to cut his losses, extricate himself from this strategic morass by seeking to negotiate in good faith a diplomatic agreement with Ukraine,” Price said. Instead, “the Kremlin continues to spread outright lies,” such as claiming the bombing of the maternity hospital was “fake news.“
“This is from a government that is now using many measures to hide the truth from its own people,” Price said.
Harris, who wrapped up a trip to Warsaw on Friday, pledged an additional $53 million in humanitarian aid for Ukrainian refugees in Poland. She met with a small group of refugees Thursday.
“We are here to support you,” she told the group. “And you are not alone. And I know there’s so much about the experience that you’ve had that has made you feel alone.”
Polish President Andrzej Duda warned Harris that an international “refugee crisis” was soon going to explode into a “refugee disaster.”
And another looming disaster could hit food supplies worldwide because Ukraine and Russia are among the planet’s top exporters of grain, fertilizer and other agricultural commodities, the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization said. The FAO projects that, if the war continues, the number of undernourished people in the world will increase by up to 13 million people by 2023.
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(Bulos reported from Kyiv and Wilkinson from Washington. Noah Bierman in Warsaw contributed.)
