Fighting raged on Wednesday March 2 in Kharkiv, in eastern Ukraine, where Russian airborne troops landed during the night according to the Ukrainian army. “Russian airborne troops landed in Kharkiv“, said the Ukrainian army in a statement on Telegram. Fighting was reported in this city of 1.4 million inhabitants near the border with Russia and which was already targeted on Tuesday by several bombardments, having made At least 21 dead and a hundred injured in the past 24 hours, regional governor Oleg Sinegubov announced on Wednesday.
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Kiev, 480 km away, is still resisting a week after the launch of the Kremlin offensive. The Ukrainian capital is still under threat, in the northwest, from a Russian military convoy observed on American satellite images. A large military device which is actually blocked, according to the special envoy of franceinfo on the spot.
This Russian convoy which stretches for tens of kilometers, unveiled overnight from Monday to Tuesday by the American satellite imagery company Maxar, has not moved for three days. It is rather an accumulation of vehicles coming to Kiev by the shortest route and stopped by a natural obstacle, the river, whose bridges have been cut, 25 km from the capital.
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It also seems that the convoy is stopped because of a crying lack of gasoline and supplies. A logistical lightness found on other columns. Tanks from the East, for example, ran out of gas on the Kiev highway. Many Russian units arrived in the country with only three days’ rations in their pack, no more.
As a result, we begin to see Russian soldiers attacking grocery stores, grabbing all the food and water bottles they can carry. Even stranger: many units, including elite units, communicate with each other only with civilian walkie-talkies, perfectly audible to everyone. The small community of Ukrainian radio amateurs has also jumped on the windfall, collecting intelligence by the bucketful and sometimes even allowing itself to jam the communications of the Russian army in full battle.
Obviously, Vladimir Putin’s forces were absolutely not ready for combat in Ukraine, as confirmed by General Dominique Trinquand, emilitary expert and former head of the French military mission to the UN in New York. On franceinfo, he specifies that if it is a “information given by the Pentagon“, “it is abnormal that a column is stopped for more than 48 hours, clearly visible on the satellite images. The Russian army has always had logistical problems. Several interlocutors on site explain that Russian logistics have not progressed as we thought. It should also be remembered that these columns come from Belarus. The attack on Karkhiv is very important: it allows us to have a logistical axis that comes directly from Russia”.
Column of tanks out of gas? ➡️ “This is the information given by the Pentagon. The Russian army has always had logistical problems”, explains Dominique Trinquand, military expert, according to whom “the attack on Kharkiv is very important to have a logistical axis”. pic.twitter.com/MS8B7P402c
— franceinfo (@franceinfo) March 2, 2022
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Russian forces, on the other hand, seemed to have advanced in southern Ukraine, on the shores of the Sea of Azov. In the port of Mariupol, more than a hundred people were injured on Tuesday in Russian fire, according to the mayor, Vadim Boitchenko. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense also indicated in the night that it feared an attack from Belarus after noting “significant activity” of planes in the border area, and convoys of vehicles carrying food and ammunition were observed there.