Russian forces bombarded Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv with explosions on Thursday as Russia’s full-scale military operation in the country continues.
According to the Kremlin, Russian troops had taken control of Kherson, a port city located in the south of Ukraine. However, a U.S. defense official disputed Russia’s claims, saying that Kherson was “very much a contested city.”
Explosions rock Kyiv as Ukraine braces for another Russian onslaught https://t.co/5lH4ImaFy8 pic.twitter.com/TlObYZ1WlI
— New York Post (@nypost) March 3, 2022
Kherson Mayor Igor Kolykhaev said in a Facebook post that the city was vulnerable, as it didn’t have “any Ukrainian forces in the city, only civilians and people here who want to live.”
“These are not warriors of a superpower,” he said of Russian troops who had overtaken the city’s administration building. “These are confused children who have been used.”
Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces shot down a missile near Kyiv’s central station, halting the massive Russian convoy from advancing towards the capital.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky praised the resiliency of his country amid the ongoing Russian invasion.
“We are a people who in a week have destroyed the plans of the enemy,” he said in a taped address on Thursday. “They will have no peace here. They will have no food. They will have here not one quiet moment.”
For the first time since the military operation started, Russia reported its war casualties, saying that 500 troops were killed and 1,600 wounded, which were far lower than the 5,000 Russian deaths reported by Western media.
Ukraine, on the other hand, said more than 2,000 civilians had been killed.
Peace talks between the two nations are expected to resume on Thursday following a failed peace negotiation that first occurred on Monday, although Vladimir Medinsky, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s top aide and head of the Russian delegation, said that Russia and Ukraine “found certain points on which common positions could be foreseen.”
Putin has attempted to justify his invasion of Ukraine by falsely suggesting Kyiv posed a serious military threat to his country and claimed: “the United States and NATO have long turned a blind eye to Russia’s legitimate security concerns.”
Russia’s state media has been hard at work trying to spin the country’s invasion of Ukraine as a mere liberation that the U.S. has since categorized as a “full war on media freedom and the truth.”
