Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said authorities had managed to evacuate around 100,000 from several cities in the past two days, but warned the threat of Russian forces deploying chemical weapons is ‘very real’ as the invasion enters its third week.
In last night’s televised address to the nation, Zelensky sarcastically addressed Russian troops and asked where they planned to deploy chemical weapons.
‘Where will you strike with chemical weapons?’ he asked. ‘At the maternity hospital in Mariupol? At the church in Kharkiv? Okhmadit children’s hospital? Or at our laboratories, which have been around since Soviet times and work on regular technology, not military technology?’
The embattled president also announced civilians were evacuated from the cities of Sumy, Trostyanets, Krasnopillya, Irpin, Bucha, Hostomel, and Izyum despite constant shelling, but Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said not a single civilian was able to leave Mariupol on Thursday as Russian forces failed to respect yet another temporary ceasefire.
The constant bombardment of the southern port city, which has been without water and electricity for close to a fortnight due to Russia’s refusal to respect ceasefires, was described by Zelensky as ‘outright terror, from experienced terrorists’.
‘The invaders launched a tank attack exactly where this ‘corridor of life’ was supposed to be. They have a clear order to hold the city of Mariupol hostage, to torture it,’ he said.
There was also widespread destruction elsewhere in Ukraine as the invaders continued their indiscriminate bombardment of civilian targets.
The Institute of Physics and Technology in Kharkiv (KIPT) and a high-pressure gas pipeline near Svitlodarsk are two of the latest locations to be decimated in the attacks as the Russian invasion of Ukraine entered its third week.
KIPT was first attacked by Russian bombing campaigns on Monday, but footage has emerged of a new blaze at the complex’s dormitories today after the institute’s neutron source was destroyed in what Ukraine’s Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate called ‘an act of nuclear terrorism’.
The newly built neutron source, which is used to initiate nuclear chain reactions among other applications, was set to play a key role in nuclear physics and radiological materials research.
According to the Inspectorate, the device had been loaded with ‘fresh nuclear fuel’ just prior to the Russian bombardment, and there were fears the shelling of the research facility could pose a threat of nuclear disaster. The Inspectorate said it had not yet ascertained the extent of the damage done to the facility, nor the number of casualties.
But the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, said no radiation had been released and that staff had placed the assembly into a ‘subcritical state’ prior to the attacks, while Harvard nuclear proliferation researcher Matthew Bunn told Physics Today that the facility generates ‘virtually zero fission products’ with no highly enriched uranium onsite.
Nikolsky mall, a large shopping, and entertainment complex in Kharkiv’s city centre, was also reduced to rubble in shelling on Thursday morning.
Meanwhile, a video taken on the outskirts of the eastern city of Svitlodarsk in the Donetsk region purported to show Russian troops destroying a high-pressure gas pipeline, sending huge jets of flame into the sky.
Pavlo Kyrylenko, the regional governor of Donetsk, published the video on his Telegram channel, confirming the Russian attack which took place at 4pm GMT.
‘The Russians have just broken a high-pressure gas pipeline near Svitlodarsk,’ Kyrylenko said.
‘How the damaged gas pipeline is burning can be seen from afar. Gas workers will soon find out how quickly they can restore it.’
Russia’s defence ministry said late Thursday that it would declare a ceasefire on Friday and open humanitarian corridors from Mariupol as well as Kyiv, Sumy, Kharkiv, Mariupol, and Chernihiv, but has gone on to break all previous ceasefire agreements and resume shelling of fleeing refugees.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has so far failed to reach its stated objectives, but has caused thousands of deaths and forced more than 2 million people to flee Ukraine in just three weeks.
KIPT is Ukraine’s foremost physical science research centre and has long been a hub of scientific and nuclear advancement, contributing greatly to the development of nuclear technology in the Soviet Union.
The Inspectorate released a statement today detailing the fallout of the attack: ‘According to preliminary information, the neutron source is completely de-energised. Information on the consequences of the damage is currently being gathered by facility staff.
‘The neutron source was already bombed on March 6, as a result of which the following losses were inflicted. Completely destroyed substation; damaged cables of air conditioner cooling systems of the linear electron accelerator; damage to the main building of the installation; damaged heating main to the complex of buildings.’
In Svitlodarsk, it was not immediately clear what regions of Ukraine are supplied by the gas pipeline, but a similar pipeline in the Donetsk region was attacked by Russian forces on Sunday, which cut off supply to a 70-mile stretch of towns in southeastern Ukraine, Kyrylenko said.
Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and former head of MI6’s Russian operations Christopher Steele echoed Zelensky’s concerns that Russia could soon deploy chemical weapons amid slow progress on the ground.
The Prime Minister said Putin is in charge of a ‘cynical, barbaric government’, and believes Russia is preparing a ‘fake story’ which it could use to deny using the weapons and to blame the West.
The Prime Minister told Sky News’ Beth Rigby Interviews show: ‘The stuff that you are hearing about chemical weapons, this is straight out of their playbook.
‘They start saying that there are chemical weapons that have been stored by their opponents or by the Americans and so when they themselves deploy chemical weapons, as I fear they may, they have a sort of maskirovka, a fake story, ready to go. And you have seen it in Syria. You saw it even in the UK.’
Steele said that although Putin had ‘grossly miscalculated’ the invasion and that his regime would not survive over the long term as oligarchs and regular citizens alike begin to feel the pinch of sanctions, the Russian leader would likely step up the violence in the short term.
‘As the Russian army becomes bogged down, more desperate, and clearly not realising its objectives militarily, you’re likely to see more indiscriminate killing and bombardment and possibly the use of a [chemical] weapon,’ Steele said.
Elsewhere, Russia continued its utterly brutal bombardment of southern port city Mariupol, one day after an airstrike landed a direct hit on a maternity hospital which resulted in three deaths and at least 17 other casualties.
There has been no relief for the people of Mariupol, which has now been under bombardment for close to a fortnight and is largely cut off from water, electricity, and humanitarian aid.
Mortuary workers were pictured yesterday putting corpses in body bags or carpets, taking them to the outskirts of the besieged port city, and then dumping them in mass graves.
The Mariupol city council posted a video on Thursday, March 10, 2022, showing buses driving down a highway, saying a convoy bringing food and medicine was trying to reach the city and would evacuate civilians during the return leg.
Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said on Wednesday, March 9, 2022, that 1,300 civilians had been killed in Mariupol and that Russian forces start shelling the city each time a humanitarian convoy tries to head there to evacuate its residents.
‘They want to destroy the people of Mariupol, they want to make them starve,’ she said. ‘It’s a war crime.’
Four previous attempts to bring relief to the city have failed, after Ukraine said Russia shelled the route it was intending to use.
Bombs also fell on two hospitals in Zhytomyr west of the capital on Thursday, March 10, 2022, the mayor said, as Russian forces intensified their siege of Ukrainian cities.
A video appeared to show a Russian plane screaming over the northwestern city and letting loose more bombs on the Berdichevsky bridge.
Meanwhile, Russia yesterday admitted its forces had deployed a thermobaric ‘vacuum bomb’ in the city of Chernihiv, confirming widespread reports that the devastating weapon had been used on civilian targets.
Britain’s Ministry of Defense said on Tuesday that Moscow had announced the use of the ‘lung-busting’ weapons, but the report was validated on Wednesday, March 9, 2022, when Ukrainian newspaper Ukrayinska Pravda said that a Russian artilleryman, Sgt. Sergei Gubarev, had told a state-owned TV station he had used the weapon.
Their information came from a report broadcast on Zvezda – a Russian state-owned nationwide television network run by the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Chernihiv, 80 miles north of Kyiv, is one of many cities that has been under heavy bombardment.
The Soviet-era weapon launches rockets from atop a tank body that suck in surrounding oxygen, creating higher temperatures and more damaging explosions that last longer than conventional blasts.
Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Wednesday, March 9, 2022, that Ukraine’s capital city has been ‘turned into a fortress’ ahead of the Russian assault, with about 2 million people – half the residents of the metro area of the capital – having fled as Putin’s troops draw ever closer.
‘Every street, every house is being fortified, the territorial defence is joining,’ Klitschko said in a televised interview today.
‘Even people who in their lives never intended to change their clothes, now they are in uniform with machine guns in their hands.’
The battle for Kyiv is now underway as Russian tanks pushed to within just a few miles of the city outskirts yesterday morning, though initial assaults to the west and east were repelled as Putin’s forces face a long and bloody campaign to try and take the capital.
Kremlin troops launched two attacks on Kyiv late Wednesday and early Thursday – one via the besieged western city of Irpin and another through the eastern district of Brovary, with video showing the moment Russian tanks and armoured vehicles were bombarded with artillery in a devastating ambush and forced to turn back.
Colonel Andrei Zakharov, commander of the tank regiment, was also killed in the ambush according to the Ukrainian defence ministry and radio chatter intercepted from Russians on the battlefield. The same transmissions suggested the column suffered heavy losses, with one tank and an armoured vehicle destroyed.
It marks just the latest Russian commander to be killed in Ukraine, after two generals were slain by Kyiv’s troops. Colonel Zakharov had been awarded the Order of Courage by Vladimir Putin in 2016.
Satellite imagery released earlier today appeared to show that the 40-mile-long convoy of Russian armour, which has been backed up outside of Kyiv for over a week, has now dispersed and redeployed in what look to be firing positions, suggesting that a larger assault on the capital is imminent.
Tanks, artillery, and other armoured units were seen in towns near the Antonov Airport north of the city, while other vehicles have moved into forests on the capital’s outskirts, according to satellite operator Maxar Technologies.
Source: Daily Mail
