War in Ukraine: Sirens blare amid warnings of all-out Russian assault on Kyiv

Air raid sirens have gone off this morning in cities across Ukraine amid warnings of an all-out assault on the capital, Kyiv, in the next few days.

In a statement early today, Ukraine’s military general staff said that forces around Kyiv were resisting the Russian offensive with unspecified strikes and “holding the line”.

It added that in the northern city of Chernihiv, Russian forces were deploying military equipment among residential buildings and on farms and claimed that in the south Russians dressed in civilian clothing were advancing on the city of Mykolaiv.

Ukraine’s military commanders said that Russia’s advance had stalled and the country was building up its defence of key population centres in the north, south and east.

Sirens warned citizens to retreat to bomb shelters in Kyiv and in the towns of Chernihiv, Lubny, Poltava and Vasylkiv, according to local media.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) has warned of a renewed attack on Kyiv in the coming four days, following the arrival in Russian-controlled areas of Chechen fighters and mercenaries.

“Russian forces continued concentrating in the eastern, northwestern and western outskirts of Kyiv for an assault on the capital in the coming 24 to 96 hours,” the ISW said. “Russian forces near Kyiv made limited gains and prepared for limited drives to continue their attempted encirclement to the west.”

President Zelensky’s wife, Olena Zelenska, published an open letter last night condemning the “mass murder” of civilians, including children, during Russia’s invasion.

She named three children who had died in the fighting: “Eight-year-old Alice who died on the streets of Okhtyrka while her grandfather tried to protect her ... Polina from Kyiv, who died in the shelling with her parents, [and] 14-year-old Arseniy was hit in the head by wreckage.

“When Russia says that it is ‘not waging war against civilians,’ I call out the names of these murdered children first,” she added.

Zelenska repeated her husband’s appeals for Nato to impose a no-fly zone over the country. “We need those in power to close the sky. Close the sky and we will manage the war on the ground ourselves,” she wrote.

The British Ministry of Defence said today that Ukraine’s air defences have “enjoyed considerable success” against Russian aircraft, which was likely to have prevented Moscow from achieving “any degree of control of the air”.

Russian forces continue to struggle in their Kyiv campaign and have failed to make any breakthroughs in taking the capital, the latest Whitehall briefing said.

Ukrainian officials said that two people, including a child, were killed by Russian firepower in the town of Chuhuiv just east of the country’s second largest city of Kharkiv last night. They added that in Malyn, a city to the west of Kyiv, at least five people, including two children, were killed in a Russian airstrike.

As of midnight on Monday, there had been at least 474 civilian deaths and 861 injured, according to the UN. Thirty-eight children had been killed and 71 wounded. The UN said, however, that the real figures were likely to be considerably higher.
Further civilian evacuations are planned today from the northeastern border city of Sumy, after about 5,000 people were able to leave yesterday.

In a Telegram post, Dmytro Zhyvytsky, the regional administration chief, said that a safe corridor would be open from 9am to 9pm and 22 buses that travelled yesterday from Sumy southwest to the city of Poltava would return this afternoon to pick up more people. Priority will go to pregnant women, women with children, the elderly and the disabled, he said.

Sumy is on the Russian border and has faced deadly shelling in recent days. The Sumy-Poltava route is the only one successfully used so far for humanitarian evacuations, as other efforts stalled or were thwarted by Russian shelling.

Russia’s defence ministry today claimed that it had foiled a large-scale plot to attack separatist-held regions of eastern Ukraine.

Major General Igor Konashenkov, the ministry’s spokesman, cited from what he claimed was an intercepted Ukrainian National Guard document laying out plans for a large-scale operation targeting the Donbas region.

Konashenkov said in a televised statement: “The special military operation of the Russian armed forces, carried out since February 24, pre-empted and thwarted a large-scale offensive by strike groups of Ukrainian troops on the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics, which are not controlled by Kyiv, in March of this year.”

He did not address Russia’s shelling, airstrikes and attacks on Ukrainian civilians or cities, Russian military casualties or any other aspect of its bogged-down campaign.

Russia calls its invasion of Ukraine a “special military operation” and official statements about the war have focused almost exclusively on fighting and evacuations in the separatist-held regions, where Russian-backed forces have been fighting Ukraine’s military since 2014.

Ukraine’s energy minister said that Russian forces now controlling the Zaporizhzhya nuclear plant, the largest in Europe, were forcing the exhausted staff there to record an address that they planned to use for propaganda purposes.

Russian troops seized control of the plant on Friday in an attack that raised fears of a nuclear disaster larger than the catastrophe at Chernobyl.

Although no radiation has so far been released, the Ukrainian energy minister Herman Halushchenko said on Facebook that about 500 Russian soldiers and 50 pieces of heavy equipment were inside the station. He said that the Ukrainian staff were “physically and emotionally exhausted”.