NASHVILLE, TN – Ten days after Russia invaded Ukraine, its army has taken only one major city, Kherson, where thousands took to the streets on Saturday. They waved blue and yellow flags and chanted “Kherson is Ukraine” and “Russians Go Home”.
Mariupol, Irpin, Kharkiv, and the capital, Kyiv, are under siege by Russian forces. The Russians are shelling and bombing those cities and fierce fighting was reported outside Kyiv Friday night near the Hostomel airport.
On Thursday, March 3, AP released photo of heavy damage to a residential area of Borodyanka, on the outskirts of Kyiv. Oleksiy Kuleba, head of Kyiv’s Regional State Administration, said that Borodyanka is “almost completely destroyed”. Small towns nearby also suffered heavy shelling and missile attacks.
A ceasefire to create a safe corridor for civilians to flee Mariupol in southern Ukraine lasted just 30 minutes on Saturday, according to the city’s deputy mayor, Sergei Orlov. It was supposed to last five hours. Orlov told the BBC that his city had been under “continuous shelling” since shortly after the ceasefire was due to start, and schools, kindergartens and buses meant to be used to evacuate civilians had been attacked.
Fifteen thousand residents in a nearby town, Volnovakha, were also unable to escape. The town has been levelled and 90% of the homes have reportedly been destroyed.
The Russian defense ministry had said its units opened humanitarian corridors near Mariupol and Volnovakha. But the ministry said evacuees took the wrong escape routes and provoked Russian troops. The defense ministry also accused Ukrainian authorities from preventing civilians from leaving.
According to Mariupol’s mayor, Vadym Boychenko, the Russian siege cut water and power to the city last Tuesday. He said Mariupol residents have no heat and food is running out. But Russian troops have not captured the city.
On Sunday, a second ceasefire in Mariupol failed because of Russian shelling, according to the city council. The BBC estimated 200,000 people are trapped there. Both sides have accused the other of breaking the ceasefire.
Snow was falling in Irpin on Sunday as civilians fled the town of 60,000. Three people were killed by mortar fire as they tried to cross an exposed road to safety. Irpin is 12 miles from Kyiv near the Hostomel airfield, which has been leveled.
Here is a link to BBC video of civilians fleeing Irpin on Sunday. Warning: this is disturbing footage. Click here to watch video.
As most of the world is well aware, a column of Russian tanks and artillery, intended to decapitate the Ukraine government in Kyiv, has bogged down. A 40-mile traffic jam of military vehicles is slowly advancing along a highway to Kyiv. Meanwhile, major cities have come under ferocious bombardment from Russian forces which have encircled them. Civilian casualties are mounting.
Moscow has repeatedly insisted that it has no intentions of occupying Ukraine, but is working to demilitarize Ukrainian territory.
In less than two weeks, Russian President Vladimir Putin has gone from saying he wanted to negotiate with Ukraine to a limited police action he said would only take out military targets, to a full- scale invasion targeting homes, hospitals, a nuclear power plant, and heavy bombardment of strategic cities with large civilian populations. A brutal full-scale war now rages in Ukraine.
Putin has imposed new criminal penalties on the press in Russia for publishing “fake news” and so now Russians only get the sanitized version from official sources. Western news outlets like the BBC and CNN have stopped broadcasting from Russia. Print outlets like Reuters, Bloomberg News, and the Wall St. Journal have not withdrawn their Moscow correspondents while they assess the impact of the new censorship law.
Reporters have rushed to cover the war in Ukraine. The Associated Press, BBC, Al Jazeera, the New York Times, CNN, and others have done very good work. Understandably, none of them have reported from the Russian column of tanks advancing on Kyiv or with any of the other Russian units attacking Ukraine’s largest cities. None have given eyewitness accounts of Ukrainian military operations against the Russian invaders either. However, signs have appeared in shop windows in Lviv, tallying the score.
The West’s Response to Russian Invasion
Putin expected a very short war and a proxy regime to be installed in Kyiv shortly thereafter. But Ukraine’s President, ex-comedian, Volodymyr Zelensky, has rallied his countrymen much like Winston Churchill did in Great Britain during World War II. He has almost single-handedly shamed EU nations into providing arms and military supplies but not the jets he needs to challenge Russian air power.
With them, he could inflict heavy damage on the Russian column of tanks and artillery headed towards Kyiv. As it is, Ukrainian missiles have struck the convoy slowing its progress. Some analysts say Russian ground forces are just waiting for the capital to be bombed into submission before occupying the capital. If they do, armed insurgency will replace the government and the conflict could go on for years.
NATO countries won’t enforce a no-fly zone in Ukraine because they are afraid Putin might start a war in Western Europe. The U.S. won’t send forces or military airplanes to defend Ukraine for the same reason. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, there is a threat of nuclear war and Putin has already signaled his readiness to use nuclear weapons. Politico reported the White House is working on a three-way trade to get Soviet-era MiGs to Ukraine from Poland but it’s a complicated scenario and would likely take months to arrange. Poland would get American F-16s in exchange.
An estimated 3,000 Americans have answered Ukraine’s call for foreign volunteers to fight Russia’s invasion, a representative from the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington DC told the Voice of America news service.
Inside Kyiv White House
Meanwhile, Zelensky has refused to leave Kyiv although false Russian news reports claimed he evacuated to Lviv last week. Unshaven and wearing a khaki green t-shirt, Zelensky posted a video on Friday. “Every two days information comes out that I have fled somewhere — fled from Ukraine, from Kyiv, from my office. As you can see, I am here in my place,” Zelensky said.
Civilians have continued to leave Kyiv and other cites while ex patriots are returning to fight.
On Thursday Zelensky gave an interview to reporters from his office in Kyiv, his first since the invasion began on February 24, 2022. New York Times reporter Andrew Kramer said the presidential office building was filled with soldiers and sandbags had been stacked along the windowsills. He reported armored cars and steel I-beams were on nearby streets to slow tanks if it came down to a street fight in the country’s capital.
Zelensky spoke with 300 members of Congress on Saturday via Zoom. He again argued for a no-fly zone. Barring that, he asked for more airplanes to defend Ukrainian airspace. But Poland, Bulgaria and Slovakia, NATO members, have said they would not send fighter jets to Ukraine.
“Zelensky’s message is simple: ‘Close the skies or give us planes,’” Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, said in a statement after the meeting. Representative Tom Malinowski, a Democrat, suggested Congress immediately approve funding to reimburse NATO allies if they give Ukraine fighters or surface-to-air missiles. Ukrainian pilots already know how to fly Russian planes so they would take quickly to the air.
For lack of jet fighters, Ukraine will probably lose the war. But remember, the U.S. controlled the skies over Vietnam, too, and we lost that war. The Russian land invasion has been slowed; it has become more deliberate and the war has progressed to a second phase, the siege of Ukraine’s major cities. In the South, Mariupol, Odessa, and Dnipro are being attacked from land, sea, and air. They are being blockaded, bombarded, and cut off from resupply, from electricity, water, and food.
This was Putin’s Plan B from the start. Fierce resistance from Ukraine’s outmanned military forces and its people has turned the war into a slog for the Russians. But Putin is no longer giving assurances that his forces are sparing civilian targets. Like Russia’s two wars in Chechnya, it is now clear that Russian forces will not spare anyone left in the war zone, which now means anywhere in the country because most Ukrainians would rather die fighting than surrender. Experts have outlined possible outcomes to the war. None of them, except Putin’s overthrow in Moscow, look good for Ukraine.
This story was updated 9:42 am and 1:27 pm Sunday, March 6, 2022.
