Six days after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Moscow will commence a “military operation” in Ukraine, bloodshed spiralled as Russian missiles rained on Ukrainian cities, including capital Kyiv, second-largest Kharkiv and Zhytomyr. As a part of sanctions against Russia, the United States joined Canada and other Western allies in banning Russian aircrafts over American airspace.
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Meanwhile, Ukraine said that the Russian invasion has killed more than 2,000 Ukrainian civilians and destroyed hundreds of structures including transport facilities, hospitals, kindergartens and homes.
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Here are the top 10 updates on the Russia-Ukraine issue today:
➡️ The Russian invasion of Ukraine has killed more than 2,000 Ukrainian civilians and destroyed hundreds of structures including transport facilities, hospitals, kindergartens and homes, Ukraine’s emergency service said on Wednesday. “Children, women and defence forces are losing their lives every hour,” it said in a statement. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said almost 6,000 Russians were killed in six days of the war, according to a Reuters report.
➡️ Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday that if a third World War were to take place, it would involve nuclear weapons and be destructive, the RIA news agency reported. Lavrov has said that Russia, which launched what it calls a special military operation against Ukraine last week, would face a “real danger” if Kyiv acquired nuclear weapons. This comes even as Russia is gathering troops closer and closer to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital’s mayor Vitali Klitschko wrote in an online post on Wednesday. “We are preparing and will defend Kyiv!,” he added. “Kyiv stands and will stand.”
➡️ Russian officials are ready to hold a second round of talks with Ukraine on Wednesday but it is unclear whether Ukrainian officials will turn up, the Kremlin said. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said there was contradictory information about the talks, which would follow a meeting at the Belarusian border on Monday that failed to produce a breakthrough
➡️ In an urgent advisory, the Indian Embassy in Ukraine asked all Indian nationals to immediately leave Kharkiv. Meanwhile, the Russian military claimed to have taken control of Ukraine’s Kherson Wednesday, according to an AFP report. Kherson lies on the Ukraine-Crimea border to the south of the country. However, Ukraine later said that they are still in control of the city.
US President Joe Biden vowed in his first State of the Union address Tuesday night to check Russian aggression in Ukraine, terming Vladimir Putin a ‘dictator’. Biden said that the US Department of Justice is assembling a dedicated task force to go after the crimes of Russian oligarchs.
➡️ Biden announced that the US is banning Russian flights from its airspace in retaliation for the invasion of Ukraine. The move follows similar action by Canada and the European Union this week. The US ban raises the possibility that Russia could respond by prohibiting US flights over its territory, which would make for longer and more costly flights, especially for cargo carriers. FedEx and UPS both fly over Russia, although they announced this weekend that they were suspending deliveries to that country.
➡️ India “strongly and emphatically” asked Ukraine and Russia to create “urgent safe passages” for the Indian nationals stuck in various conflict zones in Ukraine, after a medical student from Karnataka was killed in intense shelling in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. All Indian nationals left Kyiv Tuesday, said Foreign Ministry. It is learnt that most of the officials of the Indian embassy in Kyiv also moved to Lviv in western Ukraine and other locations to help Indians exit the country, but the mission has not been shut down.
➡️ The ninth flight of Operation Ganga carrying 218 Indian nationals who were stranded in Ukraine reached the national capital from Bucharest Tuesday. As Ukraine has shut its airspace due to the conflict with Russia, India is currently evacuating its nationals by moving them via land routes to the east European country’s neighbours, namely Romania, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, and then flying them out from there.
Continuing our efforts to evacuate stranded citizens back home. #OperationGanga #IndiansInUkraine #Aviation @MoCA_GoI @DrJitendraSingh pic.twitter.com/EY5KHga6pK
— IndiGo (@IndiGo6E) March 2, 2022
➡️ Russian forces escalated their attacks on crowded urban areas Tuesday in what Ukraine’s leader called a blatant campaign of terror. At least 136 civilians have been killed in the bloodshed so far, said the UN human rights council.
➡️ A Russian airstrike hit a residential area near a hospital late Tuesday in Zhytomyr, a city about 140 km west of Ukraine’s capital, Mayor Serih Sukhomlin said in a Facebook video. Ukraine’s emergency services said the strike killed at least two people, set three homes on fire and broke the windows in the hospital. Zhytomyr is the home of the elite 95th Air Assault Brigade, which may have been the intended target.
➡️ Ukraine has effectively asked that Russia be kicked off the internet. In a letter sent Monday to the president of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, Ukraine’s deputy minister for digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, cited the “atrocious crimes” of Russia’s invasion, including its alleged breach of the Geneva Conventions in attacking civilian targets. Federov asked that ICANN revoke, permanently or temporarily, the domains .ru and .su and shut down the root servers in Moscow and St. Petersburg that match domain names and numbers.
(With inputs from agencies)
