Kyiv braced for ‘horrific’ attack as Putin tightens the noose

Russian forces are “tightening the noose” around Kyiv and once they move in it will be “utterly horrific”, western officials warned yesterday.

The capital remains under Ukrainian control but is at increasing risk of being surrounded, with officials believing that Russia is still aiming to capture the city. Their assessment was that a devastating attack could come as Russian forces overcame the logistical problems suspected of delaying their attacks.

Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers have been preparing for street battles by digging trenches and building concrete barriers on roads into the capital.

Although the operation appeared to have stalled, with a 40-mile convoy north of the capital barely moving in days, western officials warned “this is definitely not over”.

One said: “I think around Kyiv they are continuing to tighten the noose . . . this is definitely not over. They are still set on moving in. It’ll be utterly horrific when they do.”

However, Franz-Stefan Gady, a research fellow with the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said he was “sceptical” that the Russians could take Kyiv if the city remained strongly defended and if the Ukrainian forces’ fighting morale stayed high.

“In terms of size and population, Kyiv is fairly similar to Berlin in April 1945. It took the Soviets 1.5 million men to take that city, with horrendous casualties.“This doesn’t mean that they could not flatten the city with massive firepower,” he said.

On the 14th day of the invasion of Ukraine, Russian forces were encircling at least four big cities as Kyiv was braced for a possible assault. The ministry of defence said fighting continued northwest of Kyiv and that the cities of Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Sumy and Mariupol were being heavily shelled.

In terms of gaining ground, there had been “minimal progress” by the Russians over the past 24 hours, the official added. Reasons given included stiff resistance, Ukraine’s success in using air defence systems to shoot down Russian planes and logistics problems.

“It is hard to see how this ends other than badly for Putin, but that in itself can bring another set of risks,” an official said.

He warned of the “serious concern” that President Putin could use chemical weapons in Ukraine to commit further atrocities during the invasion.

David Arakhamia, a negotiator in talks with Russia, said that Ukraine evacuated more than 40,000 people in one day but struggled to get civilians away from conflict zones around Kyiv, Kharkiv and Mariupol. Ukraine has accused Russia of shelling civilian areas and preventing the evacuations. Russia in turn blamed Ukraine.

Mariupol, a strategic city of 430,000 people on the Sea of Azov, has been besieged by Russian forces for the past week.

Civilians leaving the Kyiv suburb of Irpin were forced to make their way across the slippery wooden planks of a makeshift bridge after the Ukrainians blew up the concrete span to Kyiv to slow the Russian advance.

Russian forces are placing military equipment on farms and in residential buildings in the northern city of Chernihiv, the Ukrainian military said. In the south, Russians in civilian clothes were advancing on the city of Mykolaiv, a Black Sea shipbuilding centre of half a million people, it said.

The Ukrainian military was building up defences in cities in the north, south and east, and forces around Kyiv were “holding the line” against the offensive, officials said.

The Russian army admitted for the first time that conscripts were taking part in its military advance in Ukraine, contradicting Putin’s promise that only professional soldiers would be used.

Since Moscow poured troops into Ukraine on February 24, there have been widespread reports of young conscripts fighting, with mothers taking to social media to look for their sons and rights groups saying they were inundated with calls from conscripts’ families.

On Monday Putin said he would not send conscripts or reservists to fight in Ukraine and that only “professional” soldiers were taking part.

A spokesman for the Russian defence ministry said on Wednesday that some conscripts had been captured by Ukrainian forces.

The Russian armed forces have destroyed 974 Ukrainian tanks and other armoured vehicles since the start of what Russia calls a “special military operation”, the Russian defence ministry said yesterday, up from 897 reported on Tuesday. The ministry also said 97 drones had been shot down.

Christopher Chivvis, director of the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said there were really only two paths towards ending the war — one being continued escalation, potentially across the nuclear threshold and the other a “bitter peace imposed on a defeated Ukraine that will be extremely hard for the United States and European allies to swallow”.

Chivvis, the former US national intelligence officer for Europe, said that Putin, having invested so much already, “seems unlikely to settle for anything less than the complete subjugation of the Ukrainian government”.

In a comment piece on the think tank’s website, he warned that if the “current uneven pace of Russian military progress doesn’t accomplish the job, the most likely strategy for doing this is to make an example of a city like Kharkiv, levelling it as if it were Grozny or Aleppo, both cities that Russia has brutally destroyed in the recent past, and then threatening to burn Kyiv to the ground”.

He said that if the West supported the insurgency that followed then the Kremlin could be willing to risk attacks on safe havens in Nato territory — for example by employing irregular forces or even the shadowy Wagner Group.

“These operations could lead to a massive escalation that would open the door to a much wider war”, he wrote.

He also warned that war games carried out by the US and its allies after Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine made “clear that Putin would probably use a nuclear weapon if he concludes that his regime is threatened”.