Russia revolts: it bombs several cities and reinforces troops in Kiev

Russia, pressured by Western sanctions, bombed several cities on the sixth day of the war against Ukraine and reinforced its troops near the capital, where a kilometric column of vehicles awaits the order to attack and where it carried out a surgical attack on the television.

The order to expand the offensive given by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, was noted this Tuesday on all fronts: the south, the north and the east, with the Russian Minister of Defense, Sergey Shoigu, warning that Russia will continue the “special operation” launched in Ukraine on February 24 until it “achieves its objectives.”

Already on Monday Putin made it clear that he will only stop the invasion if Russia’s “legitimate security interests are taken into account, including its sovereignty over Crimea”, the Ukrainian peninsula annexed in 2014, as well as the “demilitarization and denazification” of Ukraine and a neutral status of that country with respect to NATO.

The head of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov, also recalled in a video message to the UN Disarmament Conference that there are other demands that must be resolved before stopping the offensive against Ukraine, which continue to be the security guarantees that Russia requested from the United States and NATO to prevent the expansion of the Alliance and the deployment of offensive weapons near the Russian borders.

“It is high time that the American nuclear weapons are taken home and the associated infrastructure in Europe is completely dismantled,” said the head of Russian diplomacy, who was unable to travel to Geneva due to sanctions.

Logos in Donbas and the Sea of ​​Azov

Despite being cornered by unprecedented sanctions, Putin, like a wounded animal, has intensified the bombing of Ukraine, especially hard this Tuesday, on the verge of a week since the start of the offensive, with dozens of civilians killed in Kharkov ( east), Kherson (south) and Kiev.

According to CNN, since the start of the war, Russia has fired more than 400 missiles at Ukrainian cities.

Russia’s greatest achievement on the military front on Tuesday occurred on the Azov Sea coast, northeast of Crimea, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.

“Since today, units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine have been blocked from access to the Azov Sea,” Russian military spokesman Igor Konashenkov said.

In the east, the pro-Russian separatists in Donbas claimed to have taken control of 29 towns hitherto dominated by the Ukrainian Army, and denounced artillery attacks by Kiev forces against the city of Górlovka, in the Donetsk region, where they would have 16 civilians were injured.

In the northeast, in the Sumy region, more than 70 military personnel and civilians were killed in Russian shelling with multiple GRAD launchers, according to Ukraine.

The day was especially hard in Kharkov, located a few kilometers from the Russian border, where the attacks left at least 16 dead and more than 40 wounded in bombings against the regional administration headquarters and a residential building.

In turn, in the south, the assault by Russian forces on the city of Kherson began at dawn, on the shores of the Black Sea and next to the Dnieper River, and in Mariupol the citizens were left practically without electricity due to the Russian attacks, according to Kyiv.

Kilometric Troop Columns

In the north, on the Kiev front, new images from the US company Maxar Technologies revealed that a long Russian military convoy on the outskirts of the capital – some 30 kilometers from the city – is larger than initially thought.

The column is already 64 kilometers long and consists of armored cars, artillery and other vehicles.

Kiev also accused Russia on Tuesday of preparing “a deliberate provocation to justify the introduction of Belarusian troops” in the neighboring country, with which it shares a border.

The President of Belarus, Alexandr Lukashenko, a faithful ally of Putin, reiterated on Tuesday that the Belarusian Army “has not taken part in the hostilities and is not going to do so.”

At dawn a Russian projectile hit a private maternity hospital in the Kiev region, and by day it shelled the television tower in the capital, causing five deaths, according to the Ukraine Emergency Service.

The Russian Defense Ministry said it had warned citizens living nearby to leave their homes.

“We warn Ukrainian citizens, used by Ukrainian nationalists to carry out provocations against Russia, as well as Kiev residents living near relay nodes, to leave their homes,” he said.

Both Shoigu and Konashenkov assured this Tuesday again that the Russian attacks do not affect civil infrastructure facilities and residential buildings, and that measures are taken to guarantee “the lives and safety of citizens”, despite the preliminary death report provided by Ukraine.