Although Russian soldiers are not believed to have made meaningful advances towards the city centre for more than a week, the bombardment has turned up the pressure. “Their plan is to wear us down through intimidation and exhaustion,” says Serhii Kuzan, head of the Ukrainian Security and Co-operation Centre, a think-tank.
To the north-west and north-east of the capital Ukrainian forces are fighting tooth and nail to hold back the Russian invasion, and whole small suburban towns are being laid to waste. Critically, they have largely succeeded in keeping Russian artillery out of range of the city centre. As a result, for many in Kyiv, the war has been more of a distant rumble than a reality—until now.
Some 25 minutes’ drive north-west of the centre, the Russian advance has been halted at the town of Irpin. In the north-east a convoy of advancing tanks was stopped at Skybyn on March 10th. Since then thousands of residents have fled the Russians, some pell-mell and others in organised convoys.
On the morning of March 14th a missile hit another block of flats, in the northern district of Obolon, killing two. A few hours later yet another missile smashed into a nearby street, destroying parked cars and a trolley-bus and killing a pedestrian. Within an hour of that strike electrical engineers were at work reconnecting severed and dangling cables.
No one knows for sure if these missiles are aimed at military targets and have missed, or are designed to sow panic by hitting civilian areas at random. If panic is the aim, it is not working.
Read it all (registration or subscription).
