KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine’s leader has accused Russia of trying to humiliate the United Nations by launching missiles at kyiv during a visit by Secretary-General António Guterres, an attack that shattered the capital’s tentative return to normal as the focus of the war moved. East.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukrainian forces were halting Russia’s attempt to advance in the south and east, while efforts continued to ensure safe passage for residents trapped in Mariupol, which has been largely reduced to rubble. in a two-month siege. An official in the president’s office did not rule out an evacuation as early as Friday.
Russia struck targets across Ukraine on Thursday, including the attack on kyiv that hit a residential high-rise and another building. The US-funded station Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty said its journalist Vira Hyrych, who lived in one of the affected buildings, was killed. Her body was found in the rubble on Friday.
Ten people were injured in the attack, including at least one who lost a leg, according to Ukraine’s emergency services.
In an apparent reference to the same attack, Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Friday it had destroyed “production buildings” at the Artem defense factory in kyiv.
The attack on kyiv came just an hour after Zelenskyy held a news conference with Guterres, who toured some of the destruction in and around kyiv and condemned attacks on civilians during his visit.
“This says a lot about Russia’s true attitude towards global institutions, about the Russian authorities’ attempts to humiliate the UN and everything the organization stands for,” Zelenskyy said in a video addressed to the nation overnight. “So it requires a corresponding powerful reaction.”
kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko derided the attack as equivalent to Russian President Vladimir Putin showing Guterres “his middle finger.”
The attacks were the most audacious Russian bombardment of the capital since Moscow’s forces withdrew weeks ago after failing to take the city in what they hoped would be a hit-and-run offensive. Instead, stiff Ukrainian resistance, bolstered by Western weapons, halted Putin’s advance and forced his troops back to regroup.
Some have now begun to push into the country’s eastern industrial heartland of Donbas, which Moscow now says is its focus. 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 Britain’s Defense Ministry said on Friday they were made at significant cost to Russian forces.
One of the goals of Guterres’ visit was to ensure the evacuation of people from the ruined southern port city of Mariupol, including a wrecked steel factory where Ukrainian defenders are sheltering and hundreds of civilians are also sheltering. Previous evacuation attempts failed.
“I cannot confirm the exact details of the operation to ensure that it is carried out 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 negotiations were under way with UN mediation and did not rule out an evacuation of the plant on Friday. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Mariupol has seen some of the most dramatic suffering of war. Under siege from the first days of the invasion, many of its residents were trapped with little access to food, water, medicine or electricity.
Some 100,000 people are believed to still live in the city, and the city council warned Thursday that a lack of safe drinking water or a functioning sewage system could lead to outbreaks of deadly diseases such as cholera and dysentery. He added that the bodies lay decomposing under the rubble.
Russian forces largely control the city, but some 2,000 Ukrainian fighters are holed up in the steel plant, the last known pocket of resistance. About 1,000 civilians are with them, and the fighters said the recent concentrated bombardment killed and wounded people.
A video posted online by Ukraine’s Azov Regiment inside the steel plant showed people combing through the rubble to remove the dead and help the wounded. The regiment said the Russians attacked a makeshift underground hospital and its operating room, killing an unspecified number of people. The video could not be independently verified.
Russia’s invasion of its neighbor on February 24 turned the post-Cold War security order upside down. Putin, long upset about NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe, says the operation seeks the “demilitarization” of Ukraine, aims to protect people in mostly Russian-speaking Donbas and ensure security. From Russia. One of Moscow’s demands has been that Ukraine abandon its bid to join the Western NATO alliance.
Ukraine and the West say it was an illegal and unprovoked invasion launched to topple the government in kyiv.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote on Twitter on Friday that a “security vacuum” had led to the war.
“Then we knocked on NATO’s door, but it never opened,” he wrote. “The world owes Ukraine security, and we ask states to decide what security guarantees they are willing to provide.”
A day after Russia attacked a wide area of Ukraine, the governor of Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region, Valentyn Reznichenko, said two cities were hit by Russian Grad rockets on Friday. There was no immediate word on casualties or damage. Separately, the governor of Russia’s Kursk region, Roman Starovoit, said a border post was hit by Ukrainian mortars and Russian border forces returned fire. He said there were no casualties on the Russian side.
Explosions on Thursday in the Shevchenkivsky district of northwest kyiv rocked the city, with flames erupting from the windows of the residential high-rise and another building. The capital 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 where Russian forces are reportedly trying to advance as part of their push into Donbas, shells rained down on Tatiana Maksagory’s home this week, devastating her family.
Maksagory’s 14-year-old grandson Igor was pronounced dead after emergency services took him to hospital. His daughter was seriously ill and his 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 on kyiv was the most audacious attack since Moscow’s pullout, not necessarily the first.
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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
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