![\"Russia-Ukraine](\"https:\/\/img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net\/tenant\/amp\/entityid\/AAUwUCJ.img?h=959&w=1438&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f\")
And they came on the eve of the resumption of ceasefire talks after a first round Monday failed to produce a breakthrough. On the ground in Ukraine, Russia appeared despite determined resistance to be intensifying the offensive ordered seven days earlier by President Vladimir Putin \u2014 in defiance of almost the entire international community. \u201cToday was the hardest, cruellest of the seven days of this war,\u201d said Vadym Boychenko, the mayor of the key southeastern port of Mariupol who said Russian forces pummelled the city for hours and were attempting to block civilians from leaving.<\/p>\n
\u201cToday they just wanted to destroy us all,\u201d he said in a video on Telegram, accusing Russian forces of shooting at residential buildings. Boychenko said more of the city\u2019s vital infrastructure was damaged in the assault, leaving people without light, water or heating. In Washington, top US diplomat Antony Blinken warned the human costs were already \u201cstaggering,\u201d accusing Russia of attacking places that \u201caren\u2019t military targets.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHundreds if not thousands of civilians have been killed or wounded,\u201d said the secretary of state, who will travel to eastern Europe next week to shore up support for Ukraine \u2014 and for efforts to secure a ceasefire. Kyiv is sending a delegation to the Thursday ceasefire talks, at an undisclosed location on the Belarus-Poland border, but has warned it would not accept \u201cultimatums.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the United Nations, the General Assembly overwhelmingly adopted a resolution Wednesday that \u201cdemands\u201d Russia \u201cimmediately\u201d withdraw from Ukraine, in a powerful rebuke of Moscow by a vast majority of the world\u2019s nations. After more than two days of extraordinary debate, which saw the Ukrainian envoy accuse Russia of genocide, 141 out of 193 member states backed the non-binding resolution \u2014 with only Eritrea, North Korea, Syria and Belarus joining Russia against.<\/p>\n
At least 350 civilians including 14 children have so far been killed, Ukrainian authorities say, and hundreds of thousands have fled the country since the invasion began, triggering punishing Western sanctions intended to cripple Russia\u2019s economy. The UN rights office, OHCHR, said it had registered 752 civilian casualties including 227 deaths \u2014 but believes the reality is \u201cconsiderably higher.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe humanitarian consequences will only grow in the days ahead,\u201d Blinken warned. At the UN, the US ambassador echoed Blinken\u2019s alarm about mounting civilian deaths \u2014 accusing Moscow of moving cluster munitions and other arms banned under international conventions into its neighbour. \u201cIt appears Russia is preparing to increase the brutality of its campaign against Ukraine,\u201d Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the General Assembly.<\/p>\n
Russia said Wednesday it had captured the Black Sea port of Kherson, population 290,000, though the claim was not confirmed by mayor Igor Nikolayev who appealed online for permission to transport the dead and wounded out of the city and for food and medicine to be allowed in. \u201cWithout all this, the city will die,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
AFP witnessed the aftermath of apparent Russian bombing on a market and a residential area in Zhytomyr in central Ukraine, and in Kharkiv, Ukraine\u2019s second biggest city. \u201cThere is nowhere in Kharkiv where shells have not yet struck,\u201d said Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine\u2019s interior minister, after Russian airborne troops landed in the city before dawn. Shelling in the northeastern city of 1.4 million a day earlier drew comparisons to the massacres of civilians in Sarajevo in the 1990s.<\/p>\n
As Russian artillery massed outside Kyiv, the former champion boxer turned city mayor Vitali Klitschko vowed to stand strong. \u201cThe enemy is drawing up forces closer to the capital,\u201d he said. \u201cKyiv is holding and will hold. We are going to fight.\u201d Residents have been hunkered down in Kyiv for a week and dozens of families were sheltering Wednesday in the Dorohozhychi metro station. In a video address, Ukraine\u2019s President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russian forces wanted to \u201cerase our country, erase us all\u201d.<\/p>\n
Five people were killed in an attack a day earlier on the Kyiv television tower at Babi Yar, the site of a Nazi massacre in which over 33,000 people were killed \u2014 most of them Jews. The 44-year-old Zelensky, who is himself Jewish, urged Jewish people around the world to speak up. \u201cNazism is born in silence. So, shout about killings of civilians. Shout about the murders of Ukrainians,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
With the civilian toll mounting, opposition to the conflict is also growing within Russia. Dozens of anti-war demonstrators were detained in Moscow and Saint Petersburg after jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny called Russians to the streets, dismissing Putin as \u201can insane little tsar\u201d. Internationally, meanwhile, the United States announced a new set of sanctions, this time targeting Russian ally Belarus and Russia\u2019s defense industry.<\/p>\n
Authoritarian Belarus and Russia are closely linked and Belarus has been used as a key staging ground for the invasion of neighboring Ukraine. Western countries have already imposed heavy sanctions on Russia\u2019s economy and there have been international bans and boycotts against Russia in everything from finance to tech, from sports to the arts. In France, President Emmanuel Macron said in an address to the nation Europe had entered a \u201cnew era,\u201d and would need to both invest in its defences and wean itself off reliance on Russian gas.<\/p>\n
EU and NATO members have already sent arms and ammunition to Ukraine, although they have made clear that they will not send troops and the EU has dampened Zelensky\u2019s hopes of membership of the bloc. In its latest move to isolate Russia, the European Union banned broadcasts of Russian state media RT and Sputnik and excluded seven Russian banks from the global SWIFT bank messaging system.<\/p>\n
In London, meanwhile, Chelsea\u2019s Russian owner Roman Abramovich said he had made the \u201cincredibly difficult\u201d decision to sell the Premier League club, pledging proceeds would go to Ukraine war victims. Abramovich, alleged to have close links to Putin, has not been named on a British sanctions list targeting Russian banks, businesses and pro-Kremlin tycoons. But the Chelsea owner\u2019s concern about potential seizing of assets is understood to have sparked his move.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Russian Minister Lavrov Says Idea of Nuclear War in Heads of Western Politicians \u00a0The United States raised the alarm Wednesday over the \u201cstaggering\u201d human cost of Moscow\u2019s invasion of Ukraine, as the apparent deployment of cluster bombs and other treaty-violating weapons raised fears of a brutal escalation in the week-old conflict. The American warnings came […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/guidepostdev.azurewebsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/guidepostdev.azurewebsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/guidepostdev.azurewebsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/guidepostdev.azurewebsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/guidepostdev.azurewebsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=693"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/guidepostdev.azurewebsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":696,"href":"https:\/\/guidepostdev.azurewebsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693\/revisions\/696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/guidepostdev.azurewebsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/guidepostdev.azurewebsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/guidepostdev.azurewebsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}