After Kyiv, the Russian troops have entered Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, where street fighting is now taking place.
On Saturday, Ukrainian officials said 198 citizens including three children had been killed since the invasion began. Moreover, 1115 people were injured including 33 children.
More than 200,000 people have now fled Ukraine into Poland and other neighbouring countries in the wake of Russia’s invasion, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) says.
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Local authorities in Kharkiv said some light Russian vehicles have managed to enter the city from northeast,
“Ukrainian forces are battling Russian troops on the streets of Ukraine’s north-eastern city of Kharkiv, said regional governor Oleh Sinegubov.
“Ukraine’s armed forces are destroying the enemy. We ask civilians not to go out.”
“Kharkiv is so close to the Russian border, about 40 kilometres (24 miles) from there, and a lot of people that live there are ethnically Russian,” she added.
There are a lot of commercial links between the two sides and even family links between the two sides.
Moreover, the Russian troops have blown up a natural gas pipeline in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s state communications service said.
However, it was not immediately clear how important the pipeline was and whether the blast could disrupt gas shipments outside the city or country. Despite the war, Ukraine continues to ship Russian natural gas to Europe.
A Ukrainian company in charge of building and maintaining roads says it is removing all road signs that could be used by invading Russian forces to find their way around the country.
Meanwhile, the Ukraine’s president says his country is ready for peace talks with Russia, but not in Belarus. Zelenskyy’s remarks came after the Kremlin said its delegation was ready to meet Ukrainian officials in the Belarusian city of Gomel.
Russia had massed tens of thousands of troops in Belarus prior to its invasion of Ukraine, and Kyiv has accused Moscow of using the country as a staging ground for its invasion.
“Over the past 24 hours, the cities of Kherson and Berdyansk have been completely blocked by the Russian armed forces,” defence ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said in a statement carried by Russian news agencies.
While Western powers continue to impose sweeping sanctions on Moscow and move to supply Ukraine with weapons, the SWIFT international payments system says it is preparing to implement Western nations’ new measures targeting certain Russian banks in the coming days.
Ejecting Russia from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) network would cripple Moscow’s ability to trade with most of the world and deal a heavy blow to the Russian economy.
Ukraine president Zelenskyy has urged world powers to scrap Russia’s voting power at the UN Security Council (UNSC), saying Russian actions in his country verged on “genocide”.
“This is terror. They are going to bomb our Ukrainian cities even more, they are going to kill our children even more subtly. This is the evil that has come to our land and must be destroyed,” the Ukrainian president said in a short video message.
“Russia’s criminal actions against Ukraine bear signs of genocide,” he added.
Meanwhile, there was no immediate response from Moscow, which itself has accused Ukraine’s government of carrying out a “genocide” in the country’s war-torn eastern Donbas region, where Russian-backed separatists control swaths of territory.
On the other side, Russian President Vladimir Putin has thanked Russia’s special forces for their actions in Ukraine, singling out those who are “heroically fulfilling their military duty” for praise.
“Special gratitude to those who these days are heroically fulfilling their military duty in the course of a special operation to provide assistance to the people’s republics of Donbas,” Putin said in a televised address, citing the two breakaway regions – the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) – in eastern Ukraine.
