Russia Bombards Ukraine Cities and Accuses U.S. of ‘Economic War’
Russian forces bombarded Ukrainian cities, prevented hundreds of thousands of civilians from escaping and destroyed a maternity hospital on Wednesday, while the Kremlin accused the United States of waging “an economic war” against Russia.
The misery wrought by Russia’s Ukraine invasion on Feb. 24 deepened further in both countries — destruction and deprivation in Ukraine, and the toll of the West’s tightening vise grip on Russia’s economy.
Perilous conditions were getting worse in several Ukrainian cities where Russian forces were closing in, increasingly striking civilian targets and leaving people trapped without basic needs like water, food, heat and medicines. In the halting efforts to evacuate, thousands of people were able to flee the city of Sumy, but in other cities, for the fourth day in a row, Ukrainian officials said that Russian shelling thwarted most attempts to create safe corridors for escaping civilians.
Things were especially dire in the southern port of Mariupol, where Russian strikes hit several civilian buildings on Wednesday, including a maternity hospital, sending bloodied pregnant women fleeing into the cold. Hundreds of casualties have been reported, people have taken to cutting down trees to burn for heat and cooking, trenches have been dug for mass graves and local authorities have instructed residents on how to dispose of dead family members — wrap the bodies, tie the limbs and put them on the street.
At the defunct Chernobyl nuclear power plant, seized by Russian troops in the days after President Vladimir V. Putin ordered the invasion, the outside electricity supply was cut off, threatening the ability to safeguard the nuclear waste stored there, the International Atomic Energy Agency said. For now, the plant has backup power and no radiation leaks have been detected, the agency said, but its warnings signaled that Chernobyl, site of the worst nuclear accident in history, could once again pose a threat to the region.
The foreign ministers of Ukraine and Russia were expected to meet on Thursday for the first time since the invasion. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, host of the meeting, said Wednesday that he hoped it would “crack the door open to a permanent cease-fire,” but such a prospect remained uncertain at best.
Mr. Putin, seeking to regain Moscow’s lost sway over Ukraine, continued to demand that his neighbor unilaterally disarm and guarantee that it would never join the NATO alliance, conditions that Ukrainian and NATO officials have described as unacceptable.
The war has claimed thousands of lives and prompted more than two million people to leave Ukraine in less than two weeks, one of the swiftest and biggest refugee flows ever seen. The United Nations said Wednesday that its monitors had confirmed 516 civilian deaths and 908 injuries, acknowledging the figures were doubtless too low, partly because of the inability to count casualties in and around southeastern cities, like Mariupol, where fighting has been intense. An estimated 5,000 to 6,000 Russian troops have been killed during the two-week invasion,