Kyiv: Russian forces have taken the Ukrainian city of Kherson, local officials confirmed, the first major urban centre to fall since Moscow invaded one week ago.
“The (Russian) occupiers are in all parts of the city and are very dangerous,” Gennady Lakhuta, head of the regional administration, wrote on messaging service Telegram late Wednesday.
The strategic port city of 2,90,000 people near the Black Sea came under siege as Russian forces pressed ahead with their offensive across other urban centres.
In a Facebook post written about 10 pm on Wednesday, Kherson’s mayor, Igor Kolykhaiev, said:
There were armed visitors in the city council today.
My team and I are peaceful people, we had no weapons or aggression on our side.
We don’t have Ukrainian Armed Forces in the city, only civilians and people who want to LIVE here!
Kolykhaiev indicated he negotiated with the invading troops.
I made no promises to them. I just have nothing to promise. I am only interested in the normal life of our city! I just asked not to shoot people.
Other restrictions imposed on the city include a curfew from 8 pm until 6 am with cars transporting food, medicines and other necessities permitted to enter the city.
Public transport is set to restart soon and pedestrians are being told to “walk one by one, maximum two.
The developments follow a day of conflicting claims over whether Moscow had made its first major gain by taking over a significant Ukrainian city.
Another key Ukrainian port, Berdiansk, has already been seized by Russian troops, while Mariupol has repelled attacks “with dignity,” according to that city’s mayor, Vadim Boichenko.
After days of intense fighting, hundreds of civilians have been killed, while around one million people have fled Ukraine since the invasion began, triggering punishing Western sanctions intended to cripple Russia’s economy.
Russia says 498 of its troops have been killed in Ukraine, its first declared death toll since President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion a week ago. The true number of casualties on each side is not known. The UN has recorded 227 civilian deaths.
Ukrainian officials have reported a powerful explosion in Kyiv, between the Southern Railway station and the Ibis hotel, an area near Ukraine’s Defense Ministry.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office said on Wednesday night that it was a missile strike.
Officials said it wasn’t immediately clear how damaging the strike was, whether there were any casualties or where exactly the missile hit.
A senior US defence official says the massive column of Russian military vehicles amassed north of Kyiv has “stalled” due to fuel and food shortages, and Ukrainian resistance. The official said that about 82% of the Russian troops that had been arrayed around Ukraine are now inside the country — just a slight uptick over the last 24 hours and that Russia has launched more than 450 missiles at various targets in the country.
In other areas of the country, the U.S. official said that the U.S. is seeing preliminary indications that Russian forces are going to try to move south towards Mariupol from Donetsk, in what appears to be an effort to encircle the city.
India abstained in the 193-member UN General Assembly on a resolution that strongly deplored Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, the third abstention in less than a week by the country in the world body on resolutions on the escalating crisis between Moscow and Kyiv.
The General Assembly on Wednesday voted to reaffirm its commitment to the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognised borders and “deplores in the strongest terms” Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.