Russian Troops Enter Kharkiv, but is still Away from Kyiv

Manas Dasgupta

NEW DELHI, Feb 27: Eve as the Russian forces kept closing in on the Ukrainian capital city of Kyiv on the fourth day of the invasion on Sunday, the Russian troops have entered the country’s second largest city Kharkiv in Ukraine’s north-east in a bid to launch an offensive from all sides of Kiev, official sources said.

An adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister and other officials have said two large explosions were heard south of Kyiv in Vasylkiv early on Sunday. As Russia’s aggression moved to the streets of multiple Ukrainian cities, the Russian Ministry of Defence said its troops have been ordered to resume their offensive “in all directions.” This comes after Ukraine’s outgunned forces held the capital for the third day on Saturday as the war continued across the country. A defiant Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told citizens to defend the nation as he himself refused to leave Kyiv.

In a statement on his official Telegram account, Ukraine interior minister Anton Gerashchenko said there was fighting in the centre of the Kharkiv city and in the area of the Hydropark. The Ukrainian army said it shot down a missile fired at Kyiv from a Belarusian Tu-22 aircraft this morning.

Ukraine rejected the Russian offer for negotiations at Belarus to end the war and said it was ready for talks at any venue other than Belarus which was the “Russian launch pad” in invasion into Ukraine. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said his country was ready for peace talks with Russia but not in Belarus, which was a staging ground for Moscow’s 3-day-old invasion.

Speaking in a video message Sunday, Zelensky named Warsaw, Bratislava, Istanbul, Budapest or Baku as an alternative venues. He said other locations are also possible but made clear that Ukraine doesn’t accept Russia’s selection of Belarus.

Moscow, however, went ahead with sending its delegation to Belarus for talks. The Kremlin said Sunday that a Russian delegation had arrived in the Belarusian city of Homel for talks with Ukrainian officials. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the delegation includes military officials and diplomats. “The Russian delegation is ready for talks, and we are now waiting for the Ukrainians,” Peskov said. The Kremlin on Sunday said it has warned Ukraine that Russia’s military operation would not be suspended during any potential talks, the Russian media said.

Ukrainian President accused Moscow with bombarding residential areas in Ukraine as its invading forces sought to push deeper into the pro-Western country. “The past night in Ukraine was brutal, again shooting, again bombardments of residential areas, civilian infrastructure,” Zelensky said in an address posted online. “Today, there is not a single thing in the country that the occupiers do not consider an acceptable target. They fight against everyone. They fight against all living things — against kindergartens, against residential buildings and even against ambulances.”

He said Russian forces were “firing rockets and missiles at entire city districts in which there isn’t and never has been any military infrastructure.” “Vasylkiv, Kyiv, Chernigiv, Sumy, Kharkiv and many other towns in Ukraine are living in conditions that were last experienced on our lands during World War II.”

In the face of the advancing Russian troops, sanctions on Russia were intensified with U.S., European Union, and United Kingdom agreeing to block “selected” Russian banks from the main international payment gateway, Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT). The assets of Russia’s central bank are also expected to be frozen, constraining Moscow’s ability to access its overseas reserves on the SWIFT global financial system. The intention of the moves is to “further isolate Russia from the international financial system”, a joint statement stated.

These joint sanctions are the harshest measures against Moscow since its forces went into Ukraine and are expected to badly hit a country that is heavily reliant on the SWIFT platform for its key natural resources trade, especially the payments for its oil and gas exports. Cutting off a country from SWIFT in the financial world is equivalent to restricting Internet access of a nation.

Prior to this, only one country had been cut off from SWIFT — Iran. It resulted in it losing a third of its foreign trade. The move against Russia is only partly implemented for now, with only some Russian banks being covered. The option of expanding it further to a pan-country ban is something that the US and its allies are holding back as a further escalatory move.

The SWIFT system is a secure platform for financial institutions to exchange information about global monetary transactions such as money transfers. While SWIFT does not actually move money, it operates as a middleman to verify information of transactions by providing secure financial messaging services to more than 11,000 banks in over 200 countries. Based in Belgium, it is overseen by the central banks from eleven industrial countries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, besides Belgium.

Ukraine has taken Russia to the International Court of Justice in The Hague on Day 4 of the invasion. The development comes even as Russian forces hit Ukrainian cities with artillery and cruise missiles. Russian vodka is being boycotted from liquor stores and bars across the US and Canada in protest of the invasion of Ukraine. Street fighting raged in Ukraine’s second-biggest city today after Russian forces pierced through Ukrainian lines, as both sides said they were ready for talks to halt a conflict that has forced an estimated 260,000 people to flee their homes.

Ukraine is establishing a foreign “international” legion for volunteers from abroad, President Zelensky said in a statement on Sunday. The President has vowed to remain in the capital Kyiv and has said it remains completely under Ukraine’s control.

Russia’s invasion force is being slowed and frustrated by unexpectedly stiff resistance from Ukrainian troops, keeping them outside Kyiv, a senior US defence official has said and claimed that Russia now has at least 50 per cent of its invasion force inside.

The United Nations said more than 1,50,000 Ukrainians had fled for Poland, Moldova and other neighbouring countries and warned the number could grow to 4 million if fighting escalates. Two Air India flights, each carrying more than 200 Indians evacuees from Ukraine, landed in Mumbai and Delhi on Saturday. Air India’s third evacuation flight, AI1940, which will depart from Hungarian capital Budapest, is also scheduled to return with evacuees to Delhi on Sunday. The prime minister Narendra Modi in a in a telephonic conversation with Zelensky sought facilitation of Ukrainian authorities for an expedited evacuation of Indians.

Finland will close its airspace to Russian planes, joining a raft of other European countries. Finland “is preparing to close its airspace to Russian air traffic,” Transport Minister Timo Harakka wrote on Twitter. Finland shares an 800-mile border with Russia. Germany will close its airspace to Russian planes and airlines for three months from 3 p.m. local time (1400 GMT) on Sunday, its transport ministry said.

Humanitarian aid flights are excluded from the ban, a spokesperson for the ministry said. The ministry had said on Saturday that it was preparing to close German airspace to Russian flights, following similar moves by other European country in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Ukraine’s president demanded that Russia should be thrown out of the United Nations Security Council following its invasion of his country. President Zelensky said in a video message on Sunday that the Russian invasion of Ukraine amounts to an act of genocide, saying that “Russia has taken the path of evil and the world should come to depriving it of its U.N. Security Council seat.” Russia is one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, giving it veto power over resolutions.

Zelensky said that Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities should be investigated by an international war crimes tribunal and denounced the Russian invasion as “state terrorism.” He dismissed Russia’s claims as lies that it wasn’t targeting civilian areas.

A European Union-wide ban for Russian flights could be part of a fresh package of sanctions on Moscow to be discussed later on Sunday by the bloc’s foreign ministers, an EU official said. A vast majority of EU member states have already closed their airspace to these flights, and a more formal decision could be taken shortly, the official added.

The United Arab Emirates wants to encourage a political solution in the Ukraine conflict and taking sides would only encourage violence, a senior UAE official said on Sunday. The comment, posted by Anwar Gargash on Twitter, comes after the UAE abstained to vote on Friday on a draft United Nations Security Council resolution deploring Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. It did not pass because of Russia’s veto.

The UAE “believes that taking sides would only lead to more violence,” said Gargash, the diplomatic adviser to UAE President Khalifa Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan. “The UAE has a firm position regarding the United Nations, international law and the sovereignty of states, rejecting military solutions,” he said.

Russian is going to be an even more familiar language on the streets of Polish cities in the coming months. Most Ukrainians can speak perfect Russian in addition to their mother tongue; in fact, many speak it as their first language. With the onset of the war with Russia, the UN anticipates more than one million Ukrainians will travel to Poland, a country that already hosts two million Ukrainians as a legacy of the previous war.

“We would like to thank the Polish people and government for their generosity, they have made us feel welcome,” says Aleks, a young man who works in the southern Polish city of Bielsko-Biala, which is four hours’ drive from the Ukrainian border. Inter-city trains are providing free transport for refugees and many Polish citizens have volunteered their time and resources and are sharing their homes during this difficult moment.