Street fights are going on in Ukraine, and Russia is bombing other cities as its progress stalls.
Kharkiv became a bombed-out wasteland in the middle of the city, says Zelenskiy. Russians “have orders to erase us,” he says.

KYIV/KHARKIV, March 2 – Ukrainians said on Wednesday that they were fighting on in the port of Kherson, the first significant city Russia claimed to have won, while airstrikes and bombing wreaked havoc in cities that Moscow’s stalled forces had yet to take.

After over a week, Russia has yet to achieve its goal of ousting Ukraine’s government, but it has killed over 2,000 civilians and destroyed hospitals, kindergartens, and residences, according to the Ukrainian emergency service.

More than 870,000 people have fled over Ukraine’s borders as a result of the invasion, and punitive sanctions have jolted the global economy, with rising oil prices increasing inflation fears.

The bombing of Kharkiv, a 1.5 million-person eastern city, has left its center a wasteland of ruined buildings and trash.

“The Russian ‘liberators’ have arrived,” one Ukrainian volunteer remarked sarcastically as he and three others struggled to move a man covered in a bedsheet out of the wreckage on a large square.

The roof of a police headquarters in central Kharkiv collapsed after an airstrike on Wednesday morning, engulfing it in flames. According to authorities, 21 people were killed by shelling and air attacks in the city in the previous 24 hours, with four more slain on Wednesday morning.

Moscow denies targeting civilians and claims to be conducting a “special military operation” to disarm Ukraine, a country of 44 million people.

Apple, Exxon, Boeing, and other multinational corporations have joined an exodus from Russian markets that has left Moscow financially and diplomatically isolated since President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion on February 24.

“He imagined that if he rolled into Ukraine, the rest of the world would follow suit. Instead, he encountered a wall of fortitude he could never have predicted or imagined: he met Ukrainians “In his annual State of the Union address on Tuesday, US President Joe Biden stated.

US politicians stood, cheered, and yelled, with many waving Ukrainian flags and dressed in the country’s blue and yellow colors. more info

Russia announced it had sent delegates to Belarus for the second round of peace negotiations. Russia, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, must cease bombing if it wants to dialogue.

On Wednesday, Moscow announced the conquest of Kherson, the southern provincial capital of over 250,000 people strategically located where the Dnipro River runs into the Black Sea.

“The city has not fallen, our side continues to defend,” Zelenskiy advisor Oleksiy Arestovych said, denying Russian control of Kherson.

Russia was also bombarding the port of Mariupol, which it claims to have surrounded in a ring around the entire Sea of Azov. Mariupol’s mayor stated the city has suffered a high number of victims after a night of severe strikes. He did not provide a total casualty tally but said it was impossible to evacuate the wounded and that water supplies had been cut off.

“The enemy occupying forces of the Russian Federation have done everything to prevent inhabitants from leaving the city of 500,000 people,” Mayor Vadym Boichenko stated in a live broadcast on Ukrainian television.

On the other two major fronts, in the east and north, Russia has so far produced little to show for its advances, with Ukraine’s two largest cities, Kyiv and Kharkiv, holding firm in the face of more heavy shelling.

In a radio interview, British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace stated of Putin, “We are going to see… his cruelty intensify.” “If he doesn’t get his way, he surrounds cities, viciously bombards them at night… and then he’ll try to break them and go inside the cities.”

ORDER TO ELIMINATE US

Russia destroyed the major television tower near a Holocaust memorial in Kyiv, the capital of 3 million people, where civilians had been sheltering at night in the underground metro, on Tuesday, killing bystanders.

In his most recent report to his country, Zelenskiy stated that the incident indicated the Russians were responsible “I know nothing about Kyiv or our history. But they are all under orders to obliterate our past, our country, and us all.”

Earlier, a fatigued and unshaven Zelenskiy, dressed in green military fatigues in a tightly guarded government facility, told Reuters and CNN in an interview that the bombing must cease in order for peace talks to take place.

“It’s essential to stop bombing people, just stop bombing people, and then sit down at the negotiation table.”

According to Western countries, Russia’s primary assault on the capital – a massive armored column stretching for miles down the road to Kyiv – has remained essentially paralyzed for days. On Tuesday, a senior US defense source mentioned issues such as food and fuel shortages, as well as indicators of dwindling morale among Russian forces. more info

“While Russian forces are alleged to have penetrated into the center of Kherson in the south, overall gains across axis have been restricted in the past 24 hours,” Britain’s Ministry of Defence said in an intelligence update on Wednesday morning.

“This is most likely due to a combination of continued logistical challenges and the strong Ukrainian opposition.”

According to the report, Russia was conducting extensive air and artillery strikes, particularly on Kharkiv, Kyiv, Mariupol, and the eastern city of Chernihiv.

The Kremlin’s decision to launch a war, after months of denying such intentions, has surprised Russians who have come to regard Putin, their 22-year ruler, as a careful strategist. have been forced to line at banks in order to save their savings, eerily similar to the post-Soviet economic meltdown of the 1990s.

Ukraine said around 1,000 volunteers from 16 nations were on their way to fight alongside Ukrainian forces, and that any Russian detainees whose families came to collect them would be released.

Moscow has not provided a complete accounting of its losses thus far, but Ukraine claims to have killed roughly 6,000 Russian troops and captured hundreds more. Images on the internet show burned-out columns of Russian tanks surrounded by bodies.

Russia has largely suppressed internal opposition, with Putin’s top detractors imprisoned or pushed into exile. According to a spokeswoman, leading opposition member Alexey Navalny suggested from prison that Russians should protest the war on a daily basis.