A firefighter works inside an apartment building damaged by recent shelling in Kyiv, Ukraine February 26, 2022.A firefighter works inside an apartment building damaged by recent shelling in Kyiv, Ukraine February 26, 2022.
But even as the fighting grew more intense, the Russian and Ukrainian governments signalled an openness to negotiations, offering the first glimmer of hope for diplomacy since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion.Ukrainian officials said Russian forces fired cruise missiles from the Black Sea at the cities of Sumy, Poltava and Mariupol and there was heavy fighting near the southern city of Mariupol.
The Interfax news agency said Ukrainian forces were in control of Kyiv’s hydro-electric power plant, citing Ukraine’s energy ministry. Ukraine said more than 1,000 Russian soldiers had been killed. Russia did not release casualty figures. Zelenskiy said late on Thursday that 137 soldiers and civilians been killed with hundreds wounded.After weeks of warnings from Western leaders, Putin unleashed a three-pronged invasion of Ukraine from the north, east and south on Thursday, in an attack that threatened to upend Europe’s post-Cold War order.
Putin says Ukraine, a democratic nation of 44 million people, is an illegitimate state carved out of Russia, a view Ukrainians see as aimed at erasing their more than thousand-year history.Western countries have announced a barrage of sanctions on Russia, including blacklisting its banks and banning technology exports. But they have stopped short of forcing it out of the SWIFT system for international bank payments.
“Ukraine was and remains ready to talk about a ceasefire and peace,” Zelenskiy’s spokesman, Sergii Nykyforov, said in a Facebook post. “We agreed to the proposal of the President of the Russian Federation.”
You are copying USA propaganda news, this military operation is succeeding very well. De-militarise Ukraine.