Vladimir Putin Russia Ukraine war

Missiles hit the the cultural heart of the city, targeting an opera house, concert hall and offices.

But Mayor Igor Kolykhayev said defiantly on Facebook that the city "has been and will stay Ukrainian". You can also get in touch in the following ways: if they run out, we will use our teeth against the enemy that is moving towards Mariupol." "This is terror against Ukraine. There were no military targets in the square - nor are they in those residential districts of Kharkiv which come under rocket artillery fire," he added. Video footage showed a missile hitting the local government building and exploding, causing a massive fireball and blowing out windows of surrounding buildings. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson accused Russia of "barbaric and indiscriminate practises... There are shortages of food already," Ms Avdeeva added. But at any moment Russia could hit the critical infrastructure facilities. Kharkiv has been bombed heavily for days now and 16 people were killed before Tuesday's attack, Mr Zelensky said. A journalist in the city, Alena Panina, told broadcaster Ukraine 24 that "the city is actually surrounded, there are a lot of Russian soldiers and military equipment on all sides". Freedom Square is the second largest city-centre square in Europe and a landmark of the city. Russian missiles and rockets have hit the cultural heart of Ukraine's second largest city in what officials said was a deadly and "cruel" attack.

Russian President Vladimir Putin gave orders to his nation's nuclear forces over the weekend, but their exact meaning is unclear. Russia has more nuclear ...

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But to intervene risks igniting the first war in the heart of Europe involving nuclear weapons. And to let Putin reduce Kyiv to rubble, with thousands of dead — ...

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. There will be no more Davos and no more St. Moritz. Instead, they will all be locked in a big prison called Russia — with the freedom to travel only to Syria, Crimea, Belarus, North Korea and China, maybe. The second scenario is that somehow the Ukrainian military and people are able to hold out long enough against the Russian blitzkrieg, and that the economic sanctions start deeply wounding Putin’s economy, so that both sides feel compelled to accept a dirty compromise. It would also require everyone to ignore the lesson already learned that Putin can’t be trusted to leave Ukraine alone. Putin doesn’t have the ability to install a puppet leader in Ukraine and just leave him there: A puppet would face a permanent insurrection. In Australia, the national swim team said it would boycott a world championship meet in Russia. At the Magic Mountain Ski Area in Vermont, a bartender poured bottles of Stolichnaya vodka down the drain. This scenario could lead to war crimes the scale of which has not been seen in Europe since the Nazis — crimes that would make Vladimir Putin, his cronies and Russia as a country all global pariahs. So, Russia needs to permanently station tens of thousands of troops in Ukraine to control it — and Ukrainians will be shooting at them every day. Or, as Putin warned the other day before putting his nuclear force on high alert, anyone who gets in his way should be ready to face “consequences they have never seen” before. I wish Putin was just motivated by a desire to keep Ukraine out of NATO; his appetite has grown far beyond that. Every day that Putin refuses to stop we get closer to the gates of hell. The battle for Ukraine unfolding before our eyes has the potential to be the most transformational event in Europe since World War II and the most dangerous confrontation for the world since the Cuban missile crisis.

If Russia takes Ukraine, then the biggest question immediately becomes what will President Putin do next? Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting ...

President Putin is also reportedly upset by Viktor Medvedchuk being charged with treason. The Ukrainian politician and businessman is a close ally of the Russian President – he is chairman of the pro-Russia political organisation Ukrainian Choice – and was thought to be his biggest influence in Ukraine before being placed under house arrest. In December last year, President Putin said Russia will seek “reliable and long-term security guarantees” from the US and its allies “that would exclude any further Nato moves eastward and the deployment of weapons systems that threaten us in close vicinity to Russian territory”. While there is a far-right movement in Ukraine, as there is in much of Europe and indeed in Russia, it is far from the dominant force in the country, and the Ukrainian Government is a long way from neo-Nazism. President Putin has also said Russia is seeking the “demilitarisation and de-Nazification of Ukraine”. President Putin said the military operation was needed to protect civilians in eastern Ukraine, saying they have been subject to “bullying and genocide by the Kyiv regime”.

It appears Russian military planners believed their own propaganda while discounting the ability of Ukrainians to fight back. But now they'll get nastier.

That means Putin must beat the clock to show “progress” in his war lest domestic support collapse and put him at risk of a palace coup. And ironically, Putin’s months of gaslighting the world by scornfully denying his preparations to invade Ukraine appear to have backfired by convincing his own people all too well. Furthermore, Russia’s Crimea-based forces in the south have broken through Ukrainian defenses and are now threatening to cut off eastern Ukraine from the west. While Ukrainians are fighting to defend their independence, half-heartedness among Russian soldiers may partially explain the unusually large numbers of vehicles they’ve abandoned and the rate at which they’ve been captured. The Ukrainians were helped by Russian planning that left inadequate forces and supplies to hold the cities, suggesting that Putin was counting on decapitating the government in the first few days and thus not concerned with having enough troops to guard the rear and maintain supply lines. But when they recklessly tried to rush the well-defended cities of Kharkiv, Chernihiv and Kyiv, they were beaten back with heavy losses.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, in which Crimea was annexed, his popularity ratings soared in Russia.

"To the international community, Putin looks angry but addled and inconsistent, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, not particularly popular or respected before the war, has emerged as a heroic figure. Almost one week of fighting in, Russian troops are on the outskirts of Kyiv," he said in an emailed note. Bremmer believed that the Ukrainian population "will be overtly hostile" to any new government installed in Kyiv by Russia. Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, called such allegations "fake news" and said Russia only focused on military targets, not civilian ones. I think he also planned to install a puppet regime in Kyiv," Ash said in emailed comments Sunday. Russians will see their living standards drop and their savings melt." "Thousands of Russian mothers will be grieving the loss of their sons. Indeed, there have been protests in Russia against the armed incursion. Ukraine's deputy defense minister put the number higher on Sunday, at 4,300, but said the figure had not been verified. Hess likened the war between Russia and Ukraine as "a fratricidal war" in a number of ways and particularly given the close historical ties between the neighbors, which has lent an ambivalence to Russian attitudes toward the invasion. His popularity ratings in February stood at 69%, according to the Levada Center, but that was a poll of 1,626 Russian adults conducted between Jan. 27 and Feb. 2 — that is, before Russia invaded Ukraine and sanctions were imposed and before Russia conceded that its own military had seen casualties during its assault. That was despite global condemnation of Putin and sanctions imposed on Russia that prompted the Russian ruble to slump against the dollar, causing living costs to rise for many Russians.