The Pentagon spokesman, John Kirby, criticized Monday the indiscriminate attacks against residential areas and the civilian population in Ukraine by Russia and pointed out that these actions, which cause innocent victims at a higher rate, seek to force the surrender of the cities.

“Whether it’s cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, artillery fire, they’re pushing a lot of hardware into cities to try to force their surrender. And this has increased in recent days,” Kirby said at a press conference.

In this sense, he has indicated that it is “largely indiscriminate” and has added that this “is resulting in more civilian victims, more damage to residential areas, hospitals, schools and innocent victims.”

“We believe that the Russians are reacting to this lack of progress by escalating these attacks to force cities and towns to surrender,” he said. Kirby has stressed that “on the 26th day” of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has failed “many or almost none of the goals it set out to achieve”.

Regarding the talks between the United States and Slovakia to provide defensive systems to Ukraine, Kirby has pointed out that “they are active consultations” and that the objective is to include long-range air defense.

“We would like to do it as quickly as possible. But these are obviously sovereign decisions that other nations have to make. These are systems that they are using for their own defense”, he transferred during the press conference.

The Pentagon has detailed that, over the course of the last 48 hours, Russian forces are in control of Curzon. “The Ukrainians launched the counterattack to pursue them at Curzon. And we know that they went up that coast to Mariupol. We assess that they are in control of a town called Berdyansk, but Mariupol has not fallen”, he has said.

“They have not been able to achieve many of their goals on the ground. And because they’re still essentially stuck outside of Kyiv, outside of Kharkiv, outside of Chernihiv and so many other places, they’re intensifying what we here at the Pentagon call long-range fires: bombing from afar.” has indicated.

Kirby has also warned of increased naval activity in the northern Black Sea. “We have seen that we have indications that some of the shelling around Odessa is coming from the sea by surface combatants,” he said.

“Clearly we are looking at that now. It is difficult to know what this indicates. Is this the prelude to an assault on Odessa? Is it a diversionary tactic to hold and pin the Ukrainian troops in the south so that they cannot come to the aid of their comrades, Mariupol and Kyiv? It’s hard to know,” she said.