Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy angrily warned Moscow that it is sowing a deep hatred forﷺ Russia among his people, as constant artillery barr💧ages and aerial bombings are reducing cities to rubble, killing civilians and driving others into shelters, leaving them to scrounge for food and water to survive.
“You are doing everything so that our people themselves leave the Russian language, because the Russian language will now be associ🅷ated only with you, with your explosions and murders, your crimes," Zelenskyy said in an impassioned video address late Saturday.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has ground into a war of attrition in many places, with♍ the toll on civilians rising as Moscow seeks to pound cities in𝔉to submission from entrenched positions.
Russian rockets struck the westernಞ Ukrainian city of Lviv🌠 on Saturday while President Joe Biden visited neighboring Poland, serving as a reminder that Moscow is willing to strike anywhere in Ukraine despite its claim to be focusing its offensive on the country's east.
Early Sunday, a chemical smell still lingered in the air as firefighters in Lviv sprayed water on a burned section of an oil facility h🍌it in the Russian attack.
A security guard at the site, Prokopiv Yaroslav, said he saw three rocket𒁏s s🐲trike and destroy two oil tanks but no one was hurt.
“The seco🌊nd strike threw me to the ground,” heও said.
Russia's back-to-back airstrikes shook the city that has become a haven for an estimated 200,000 people who have had to flee their hometowns. Lviv had🍷 been largely spared since the invasion began, although missiles struck an aircraft repair facility near the main airport a week ago.
In the dim, crowded bomb shelter under an apartment block a short ways from the first blast site, Olana Ukrainets, a 34-year-old IT professional, said she couldn't believe she had to hide 💫again after fleeing from the northeastern city of ꦦKharkiv, one of the most bombarded cities of the war.
“We were on one side of the stre𓂃et and saw it on the other side,” she said. “We saw fire. I said to ✱my friend, What's this?' Then we heard the sound of an explosion and glass breaking. We tried to hide between buildings. I don't know what the target was.”
ᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚTwo cities on opposite ends of the cou༺ntry are seeing some of the worst suffering at the moment, Chernihiv in the north — strategically located on the road from the Belarusian border to the capital, Kyiv — and Mariupol in the south, a key port city on the Sea of Azov.
B🅰oth are encircled by Russian forces, but still holding out🍬.
Chernihiv has been under attack since the early days of the invasio💙n and over the last week, Russia destroyed the main vehicular bridge leading 💮out of the city and rendered a nearby pedestrian bridge impassable, cutting off the last route for civilians to flee, or for food and medicine to be brought in.
Chernihiv's remaining residents are terrified that each blast, bomb and body that lies uncollected on the streets ensnares them in the same macabre🌞 trap of unescapable killings and desܫtruction.
“In basements at night, everyone is💖 talking about one thing: Chernihiv becoming (the) next Mariupol,” said 38-year-old resident ꦆIhar Kazmerchak, a linguistics scholar.
He spoke to The Associated Press by cellphone, amid incessant beeps signaling that his battery was dying. The city is without power, running water ♒and h💖eating. At pharmacies, the list of medicines no longer available grows longer by the day.
Kazmerchak starts his day inꦛ long lines for drinking water, rationed to 10 liters (2 1/2 gallons) per person. People come with empty bottles and buckets for filling when water-delivery trucks make their rounds.
"Food is runni𝓡ng out, and shel⛦ling and bombing doesn't stop,” he said.
More🎃 than half of the city's🎃 280,000 inhabitants have already fled and hundreds who stayed have been killed, Mayor Vladyslav Atroshenko said.
Russian forces have bombed residential areas from low altitude in “abꩲsolutely clear weather" and "are deliberately destroying civilian infrastructure: schools, kindergartens, churches, residential buildings and even the local football stadium,” Atroshenko told Ukrainian television.
Refugees from Chernihiv who fled the encirclement and reached Poland this week spoke of broad and terrible destruction, with bombs flattening🐟 at least two schools in the city center and strikജes also hitting the stadium, museums and many homes.
They said that with utilities knocked out, people are taking water from the Desna to drink and that strikes are killing people while they wait in line for food. Volodymyr Fedorovych, 77, said he narrowly escaped a bomb that fell on a bread line he had been standing in just moments earlier. He said the blast killed 16 people and injured dozens, blow꧂ing off arms and legs.
So intense is the siege that some of tho🌸se trapped cannot even muster the strength to be afraid anymore, Kazmerchak said.
“Ravaged houses, fi🉐res, corpses in the street, huge aircraft bombs that didn't explode in courtyards are not surprising anyone anymore,” he said. “People are simply tired of being scared and don't even always go down to the basements.”
Britain's defense ministry said Saturday that it doesn't expect a reprieve for ci𓆉tizens of Ukraine's bombarded cities anytime soon.
“Russia will continue to use its heavy firepower on urban area🎃s as it looks to limit its own already considerable losses, at the cost of further civili꧃an casualties,” the U.K. ministry said.
Previous bombings of hospitals and other nonmilitary sites, includin🐲g a theater in Mariupol where Ukrainian authorities said a Russian airstrike is believed to have killed 300 people last week, already have given rise to war crimes allegations.
The invasion has driven more than 10 million people from their homes, almost a quarter of Ukraine's population. Of those, more than 3.7 million have f♏led the country entirely, according to the Uniteౠd Nations. Thousands of civilians are believed to have died.
