The Russian army on Friday extended its offensive to another major city in Ukraine, Dnipro, and continued its bombardments hitting residential areas and civilian infrastructure, pushing more and more civilians to flee to the west of the country and European countries. neighbors.
More than 2.5 million people have already taken refuge abroad, the majority in Poland, and around two million have been displaced by fighting in Ukraine itself since the invasion began on February 24, according to the High Commission United Nations for Refugees.
So far spared by the Russian advance, Dnipro, a major industrial center of a million inhabitants on the Dnieper River, which marks the separation between the partly pro-Russian east of Ukraine and the rest of the country, has been early Friday the target of raids that left at least one dead, according to local authorities.
“There were three airstrikes on the city, on a kindergarten, a residential building and a two-storey shoe factory where a fire then broke out,” Ukrainian emergency services said.
Adding its procession of images of desolation to those of Kharkiv (north-east) and Mariupol (south), two of the cities most affected since the start of the Russian invasion, Dnipro woke up dazed, in a setting of charred, gutted or blown up buildings.
AFP saw firefighters put out fires in smoking ruins in the morning. Some buildings were nothing more than a pile of twisted metal beams and structures.
After a pediatric hospital on Wednesday in Mariupol, an establishment for the disabled was hit on Friday, near Kharkiv, without however causing any victims, according to an initial assessment of the emergency services.
“It is a war crime against civilians, a genocide of the Ukrainian nation! “, lambasted the head of the regional administration, Oleh Singoubov.
According to him, 330 people – including 10 in wheelchairs and 50 with reduced mobility – were on the scene at the time of the attack. “The frameworks of the building were destroyed at the level of the 2nd and 3rd floors”, specified the emergency services.
Abandoned bodies
Four Ukrainian soldiers were also killed and six injured in the bombardment of the military airport of Lutsk, in the northwest of the country, according to a new report from the mayor of the city.
Russian forces also targeted the Ivano-Frankivsk military airport in far western Ukraine.
The Lutsk and Ivano-Frankivsk airbases have been “decommissioned”, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.
Night air raids also hit the cities of Chernihiv (north), Sumy (north-east) and Kharkiv, already heavily affected, damaging residential buildings and water and electricity supply infrastructure.
From Kharkiv to Mariupol, via Mykolaiv in the south, the humanitarian situation continues to worsen in the cities besieged or threatened by the advance of the Russians.
Bodies abandoned in the streets, a huge mass grave as the only burial place for the others, civilians trying to flee under the bombs: the very rare information emanating from the port of Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, where communications are almost cut off , tell the despair of the inhabitants.
The city is without water, without gas, without electricity, without communications, and in recent days people have been seen fighting for food.
At the morgue of Mykolaiv, a city on the shores of the Black Sea under Russian fire for days, the bodies pile up on the ground and in the courtyard of the establishment, where the snow falls without stopping, noted the AFP.
A corpse lies with its hands clasped, as if in prayer. In reality, says the morgue employee, he was throwing molotov cocktails when the Russians caught him. They tied his hands and executed him.
The Russian army also continues to take the capital in pincers. After reaching the outskirts of Kiev, it tries to eliminate the Ukrainian defenses in several localities to the west and north of the city to “block” it, explained the Ukrainian general staff.
Nearly 20,000 people have already evacuated on Wednesday and Thursday from the Kiev region and some 100,000 in total over these two days from towns plagued by fighting, according to the Ukrainian authorities.
Syrian mercenaries?
While the Russian army seems slowed in its advance by the fierce resistance of the Ukrainians, according to Western military sources, President Vladimir Putin has given the green light to the sending of “volunteer” fighters, in particular from Syria.
“If you see that people want to go there voluntarily, which is not for money, and help those who live in the Donbass (eastern Ukraine, editor’s note), then you have to meet them and help them. to join the combat zone”, he launched in response to a proposal from his Minister of Defense.
Syrian mercenaries are already fighting alongside the Russians and the Syrian army against the jihadists. They were also employed alongside mercenaries from the Russian Wagner Force in Libya.
The master of the Kremlin also asked his Minister of Defense to offer him military redeployments on the western border of Russia, in response to those of NATO in Eastern Europe.
Vladimir Putin, however, said that “positive progress” had been achieved during the Russian-Ukrainian talks. The last round took place on Thursday in Turkey, for the first time at the level of foreign ministers.
The Atlantic Alliance has deployed thousands of troops in Central and Eastern Europe in response to the Russian military intervention in Ukraine. Among the NATO countries, Poland and the three Baltic countries have common borders with Russia.
US President Joe Biden was to announce for his part on Friday that he wanted to exclude Russia from the normal regime of world trade relations, which would pave the way for tariff increases, said a source familiar with the matter.
In addition to a wave of sanctions that aim to suffocate the Russian economy, the United States and its European allies are also trying to help Ukraine militarily while avoiding the direct involvement of NATO member states. The US Congress adopted Thursday a staggering envelope of nearly 14 billion dollars for the Ukrainian crisis.
The United Kingdom also announced that it would sanction 386 Russian elected officials who supported the invasion of Ukraine.
Meeting at a summit in Versailles, near Paris, to work out economic and military responses to the shock of the Russian invasion, the Heads of State and Government of the Twenty-Seven ruled out a rapid accession by Ukraine to EU, while opening the door to closer ties.
The UN Security Council will also meet on Friday at 4:00 p.m. GMT at the request of Moscow, on the alleged manufacture of biological weapons in Ukraine, categorically denied by President Volodymyr Zelensky.