Kyiv: Fighting has reached the northern suburbs of Kyiv after a night of missile attacks on the Ukrainian capital to prepare for a major Russian assault, as president Volodymyr Zelenskiy pleaded for more international help and tougher sanctions.
Air raid sirens wailed over the city of three million people and heavy gunfire and explosions were heard in a residential district on Friday morning. Ukrainian officials warned that Russian military vehicles were approaching the city from the northwest.
A day after the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, launched an invasion that shocked the world, a senior Ukrainian official said Russian forces would enter the city limits later in the day, adding that Ukrainian troops were defending positions on four fronts.
Pre-dawn blasts in Kyiv set off the second day of violence after Putin on Thursday defied western warnings to unleash the biggest attack on a European state since the second world war. It has so far claimed at least 150 lives and displaced more than 100,000.
“Horrific Russian rocket strikes on Kyiv,” Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, tweeted. “Last time our capital experienced anything like this was in 1941 when it was attacked by Nazi Germany. Ukraine defeated that evil and will defeat this one.”
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said Moscow was ready for talks if Ukraine’s military surrendered, as he insisted the invading forces were seeking to free the country from “oppression” and would not seek to occupy it.
The Ukrainian defence ministry said Russian forces had entered the Obolonskyi district of Kyiv, about six miles from the centre of the city. In a statement posted online, it advised residents to report the movements of Russian troops and “prepare Molotov cocktails in order to neutralise the enemy”.
Cleaning broken glass from her room, one Kyiv resident, Oxana Gulenko, said: “How we can live through it in our time? What should we think? Putin should be burnt in hell along with his whole family.”
Witnesses said loud explosions could also be heard in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-biggest city, close to Russia’s border, while air raid sirens sounded over Lviv in the west. A resident told the Guardian the eastern city of Sumy had been taken.
Ukrainian officials said a Russian aircraft had been shot down and crashed into a building in Kyiv overnight, setting it ablaze. An unverified recording showed a Russian warship ordering a Ukrainian Black Sea outpost to surrender. The Ukrainians reply: “Russian warship, go f-k yourself.”
In the Ukrainian village of Starognativka near the frontline where separatists have faced off against Kyiv’s forces for years, a local official, Volodymyr Veselkin, said missiles had been raining down all morning and the power was out. “They are trying to wipe the village off the face of the earth,” he said.
The UN’s refugee agency said some 100,000 people were already displaced inside Ukraine, while thousands of others fled across the border. Streams of people in cars and on foot were seen crossing into Hungary, Poland and Romania at border points where queues were lasting up to 15 hours.
Zelenskiy said in a televised address early on Friday that Putin was targeting civilians as well as military sites. “They say that civilian objects are not a target for them. It is a lie; they do not distinguish in which areas to operate,” he said, vowing to continue defending his country.
The president, who also criticised world leaders for “watching from afar”, spoke after large explosions were heard in the capital, and after a warning from US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, that “all evidence suggests that Russia intends to encircle and threaten” the city. Zelenskiy has vowed to stay in the capital.
The UK defence secretary, Ben Wallace, has said it is the view of British intelligence that Russia intends to invade the whole of Ukraine, but that its army failed to deliver on the first day of its invasion.
The international criminal court said on Friday it might investigate possible war crimes, though did not provide any further details. Putin says Ukraine is an illegitimate state carved out of Russia, although his ultimate aims remain obscure.
Blinken told a meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe on Thursday that the US believed Moscow had “developed plans to inflict widespread human rights abuses – and potentially worse – on the Ukrainian people”.
The west scrambled to respond to Putin’s aggression with a range of new sanctions against Moscow, with the US also announcing it would send 7,000 more troops to Germany to shore up Nato’s eastern borders. But even after the invasion, there were divisions on the strength of the response.
The EU faced furious remonstrations from Kyiv after Europe’s leaders held back from imposing the potentially most damaging sanction on Russia: blocking Russia from the international payments system through which it receives foreign currency.
(Photo: Natali Sevriukova stands outside her apartment block in Kyiv following a rocket attack on Friday)