The Ukrainian army and Russian forces clash in Kiev on Saturday morning for control of Ukraine’s capital, two days after the launch of an invasion of the country ordered by Vladimir Putin.
Fighting took place on Victory Avenue, one of the main arteries of the Ukrainian capital, a few hours after a dramatic call for mobilization launched by President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“In Kyiv, heavy fighting continues. The Ukrainian army pushes back Russian saboteurs,” the Ukrainian Special Communications Service said on Saturday around 03:30 GMT. On Facebook, the Ukrainian army said for its part that it destroyed a column of five Russian military vehicles, including a tank, near the Beresteiska metro station, located on Victory Avenue, in the north-west of the capital.
At 00:30 GMT, Ukraine’s Special Communications Service claimed that Russian forces were trying to attack a power station in Troieshchyna district, northeast of Kyiv.
Residents of the town have been told to stay in their shelters or, if they are at home, to stay away from windows. The anti-aircraft siren was also triggered at dawn in Kharkiv, a large city in eastern Ukraine near the Russian border, according to the Special Communications Service.
The Ukrainian army also reported “heavy” fighting 30 km southwest of the capital, where the Russians “are trying to land paratroopers”.
The population of Kiev had prepared for the worst after the message of its president. “Tonight, they will try to seize” Kiev, said Mr. Zelensky a few hours earlier in a video address broadcast Friday evening on the website of the presidency.
Russian veto at the UN
And two days after this Russian invasion, announced in the middle of the night by President Putin, some 100,000 people have already been displaced and 50,000 have left Ukraine, according to the UN, powerless at the same time to condemn Moscow.
As expected, Russia vetoed a resolution in the Security Council on Friday deploring its “aggression”, a text yet supported by a majority of countries. This proves that “the world is with us, the truth is with us, victory will be ours!” “, tweeted the Ukrainian president after this vote.
Demonstrations of support for Ukraine took place all over the world. In Montreal, dozens of people gathered Friday afternoon under a snowstorm, under the windows of the Consulate General of Russia.
The master of the Kremlin nevertheless seems determined to continue his offensive, until obtaining a change of regime in Ukraine and dislodging from power in Kiev those whom he qualifies as “drug addicts” and “neo-Nazis”.
He also called on the Ukrainian military to turn their weapons against the government. Thus, he said, “it seems to me that it will be easier to negotiate between you and me”.
On the ground of operations in Kiev, in the Oblon district, AFP saw a civilian killed on a sidewalk on Friday and paramedics rescued another, prisoner of the carcass of a car crushed by an armored vehicle.
“They distributed the rifles, loaded them for us and here we are,” says Yuri Korchemniy, who had never held a weapon in his life before joining a battalion of civilians ready to defend Kiev step by step against the enemy. Russian.
After many people fled on Thursday, the center of Kiev, a metropolis that normally has some three million inhabitants and is now under curfew, looked like a ghost town.
The invasion has thrown thousands of Ukrainians on the roads, who are flocking to the EU’s borders – notably in Poland, Hungary and Romania.
NATO, whose leaders met on Friday by videoconference, has repeated in recent days that it would not send troops to this country. Joe Biden, on the other hand, warned that no “inch of NATO territory” would be ceded and the Pentagon will send some 7,000 more men to Germany.
Sanctions against Putin
For now, the Western camp is focused on tightening sanctions on Russia after it restricted its access to financial markets and technology.
The Westerners, Washington in the lead, took a new step on Friday by imposing, a rare and symbolic fact, sanctions on Vladimir Putin himself and on his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
The Russian offensive began at dawn on Thursday, after Vladimir Putin recognized Monday evening the independence of two Ukrainian separatist territories in Donbass, sponsored by Moscow since 2014.
The master of the Kremlin took as a pretext an alleged “genocide” orchestrated by Kiev in these “republics”, denouncing moreover the “aggressive” policy of NATO.