KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of trying to humiliate the United Nations by launching missiles on kyiv during a visit to the city by the UN chief, an attack that shattered weeks of relative calm and a tentative return to normalcy in capital.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces struggled to contain Russian attempts to advance in the south and east, Zelenskyy reported. And efforts continued to organize safe passage for residents trapped in Mariupol, largely reduced to rubble in a two-month siege. An official in the president’s office said an evacuation could happen as soon as Friday.
Russia struck targets across Ukraine on Thursday, hitting a residential skyscraper and another building in kyiv. The US-funded station Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty said one of its journalists was killed.
In an apparent reference to the attack, Russia’s Defense Ministry said it had destroyed “production buildings” at the Artem defense factory in kyiv.
The bombardment came just an hour after Zelenskyy held a news conference with UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who toured some of the destruction in and around kyiv and condemned the attacks on civilians.
“This says a lot about Russia’s true attitude towards global institutions, about Russian leaders’ attempts to humiliate the UN and everything the organization stands for,” Zelenskyy said Thursday night in his late-night video address to the nation. “Therefore, it requires a correspondingly powerful response.”
kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said the attack was Russian President Vladimir Putin’s way of showing Guterres “his middle finger.”
The attacks were the boldest Russian attack on the capital since Moscow’s forces withdrew weeks ago after failing to take the city. Russia is now moving towards Donbas, the country’s eastern industrial region, which the Kremlin says is its main target.
Getting a full picture of the unfolding battle in the east has been difficult because airstrikes and artillery shelling have made it extremely dangerous for reporters to move. Both Ukraine and the Moscow-backed rebels fighting in the east have also introduced strict restrictions on reporting from the combat zone.
But so far Russian troops and separatist forces appear to have made minor gains, and the British Defense Ministry said they were made at significant cost to Kremlin forces.
One of the goals of Guterres’ visit was to ensure the evacuation of people from the ruined southern port of Mariupol, including a wrecked steel mill where some 2,000 Ukrainian defenders and 1,000 civilians took refuge in the last major resistance bastion in the city. Previous evacuation attempts failed.
Some 100,000 people are believed to be trapped in the city with little water, food, heat or electricity.
“I cannot confirm the exact details of the operation to make sure it is done safely for our people and for the civilians stranded in Mariupol,” said Saviano Abreu, spokesman for the UN humanitarian office.
An official from Zelenskyy’s office said UN-mediated negotiations were underway.
Two cities in Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region were hit by Russian rockets on Friday, the regional governor said. There was no immediate word on casualties or damage.
The governor of Russia’s Kursk region said a border post was hit by mortars from Ukraine and Russian border forces returned fire. He said there were no casualties on the Russian side.
Explosions on Thursday in the Shevchenkivsky district of northwestern kyiv rocked the city. Flames shot out of the windows of the buildings hit.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty said the body of Vira Hyrych, a journalist who had worked for the station since 2018 and who lived in one of the buildings, was found in the rubble on Friday.
Radio Free Europe president Jamie Fly said the broadcaster was “shocked and angered by the senseless nature of his death at home in a country and city he loved”.
Ten people were injured in the attack, including at least one who lost a leg, according to emergency officials.
kyiv had emerged relatively unscathed in recent weeks, and cafes and other businesses have begun to reopen, while a growing number of people have come out to enjoy the spring weather.
The terrible human cost of the war, which has driven more than 11 million Ukrainians from their homes, continues to mount.
In Lyman, a town in Donetsk, Donbas, shells rained down on Tatiana Matsegora’s house this week. Matsegora’s 14-year-old grandson, Igor, was pronounced dead after rescuers took him to hospital. Her daughter was seriously ill and her son-in-law was also killed.
“‘Grandma, will I live?'” she said Igor asked her when they were in the basement, waiting for help. “I said I would live. But look what happened: I betrayed him.”
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This story has been updated to correct that Thursday’s attack in kyiv was the most audacious attack since the pullout from Moscow, not necessarily the first, and also to correct the spelling of the surname of the woman who lost her grandson at the hands of Matsegora.
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Associated Press writers Jon Gambrell and Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Mstyslav Chernov in Kharkiv, Yesica Fisch in Sloviansk, and AP staff around the world contributed to this report.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
Reference-abcnews.go.com