Russian attacks outside Kyiv intensify as forces close in
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Scenes of destruction in town after town
Lyse Doucet
Chief International Correspondent, Kyiv
Around Ukraine, in all corners of this country, Ukrainians are being wakened, before first light, by air-raid sirens.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is now calling it a war of annihilation. And when you see the images from one town and city after another it doesn’t seem much of an exaggeration.
This morning we hear of Mykolaiv, in the south-west, on the way to the southern city of Odesa – it’s under intense bombardment.
We hear about Melitopol, also in the south. It was one of the first towns to fall to the Russians. The report this morning is that the mayor, Ivan Fedorov, who was defiant when the Russians came in saying “I will not give up”, was taken away from his office by the Russians, a bag on his head.
Mariupol – there people are freezing, starving, dying, melting snow to drink, chopping wood to cook and people are being buried in mass graves.
It’s not just the south. Chernihiv in the north – before the war a city of 300,000 people – has been under a constant barrage of shelling, aerial bombardment and there too heating, gas, electricity and water supplies are cut.
Seventeen days and this is the situation across Ukraine.
People often compare it to Syria – we saw this situation in Syria after several years of war and this is Ukraine now in its third week.
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