A Russian airstrike hit a residential building in Kyiv as Moscow’s forces stepped up their brutal campaign to capture Ukraine’s capital and other major cities. One person was found dead in the nine-storey apartment building, officials said, with three more people hospitalised as air raid sirens sounded in the capital and other cities hours before Ukrainian and Russian negotiators were set to resume talks.
The Antonov aircraft plant in Kyiv was shelled by Russian forces, the Kyiv city administration said in an update on its official Telegram account. At least two people were killed and seven injured, it said.
Ukrainian authorities have denied accusations by the Russians after a Ukrainian missile allegedly exploded in the separatist-controlled city of Donetsk killing at least 20 civilians. Ukrainian military spokesman Leonid Matyukhin said the missile, that carried a shrapnel warhead, was in fact a Russian rocket. The Russian and Ukrainian claims cannot be independently verified.
There are reports that Russian forces blew up explosives at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Ukraine’s parliament earlier said Russian troops planned to begin “disposal” of ammunition in front of the Zaporizhzhia plant, Europe’s largest nuclear power station.
At least nine people were reportedly killed and nine more wounded in an airstrike on a television tower in Ukraine’s northern Rivne region. “There are still people under the rubble,” governor Vitaliy Koval said in an online post, Reuters reports.
Ninety children have been killed and more than 100 wounded in Ukraine since Russia invaded on 24 February, the Ukrainian general prosecutor’s office said. “The highest number of victims are in the Kyiv, Kharkiv, Donetsk, Chernihiv, Sumy, Kherson, Mykolayiv and Zhytomyr regions,” it said in a statement.
A convoy of more than 160 cars departed from Mariupol today, local officials said, in what appeared to be the first successful attempt to evacuate civilians from the encircled Ukrainian city. After several days of failed attempts to deliver supplies to Mariupol and provide safe passage out for trapped civilians, the city council said a local ceasefire was holding and the convoy had left for the city of Zaporizhzhia.
A close ally of Vladimir Putin has admitted Russia’s military operation in Ukraine has not gone as quickly as the Kremlin had wanted, Reuters reports. National Guard chief Viktor Zolotov blamed the slower-than-expected progress on what he said were far-right Ukrainian forces hiding behind civilians, an accusation repeatedly made by Russian officials.
Russia has denied reports that it has asked China for military equipment, claiming it has sufficient military clout to fulfil all of its aims in Ukraine without any need for help from China. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Russian troops could take “major population centres under full control” in Ukraine.
