Ukraine-Russia War, Kyiv News: Live Updates

He was alive. Kyiv had not fallen. Any stories of Ukraine laying down its arms was a lie, Mr. Zelensky mentioned.

“I’m right here,” he mentioned. “We aren’t placing down any arms. We’ll defend our nation, as a result of our weapons are our reality. The reality is that that is our land, our nation, our youngsters, and we’ll defend all of them.”

“That’s it. That’s what I wished to inform you. Glory to Ukraine.”

His feedback, launched earlier than 9 a.m., got here as preventing intensified in Kyiv. What till three days in the past had been a thriving European metropolis has been remodeled right into a battle zone. Russian troops pressed in from all instructions.

There was intense avenue preventing, and bursts of gunfire and explosions might be heard throughout town, together with its coronary heart, Maidan sq., the place in 2014 Ukrainian protests led to the toppling of a pro-Moscow authorities.

The Russian navy has a decisive edge in cyberwarfare, tanks, heavy weaponry, missiles, fighter planes and warships. In sheer numbers, its navy dwarfs that of Ukraine.

Russia has established assault strains into three cities — Kyiv within the north, Kharkiv within the northeast and Kherson within the south — and Ukrainian troops are preventing to carry all three. The Pentagon reported late Friday that the Russians didn’t seem like answerable for a single main inhabitants middle. Considerably, a senior U.S. protection official mentioned, Ukrainian command and management stays intact.

The Ukrainian authorities reported that a whole lot of Russian troopers had been killed within the warfare, together with scores of their very own troopers, whereas the Russian protection ministry issued an announcement on Saturday morning that made no point out of any casualties or something in regards to the battle for Kyiv.

The Russian invasion began with focused airstrikes earlier than daybreak on Thursday, however on the third day of the warfare, bloody battles have been usually being waged in shut quarters. Ukrainska Pravda, a Ukrainian information website, citing witnesses, reported fight 400 yards from Maidan Sq. in central Kyiv.

All Ukrainian males of preventing are being drafted into service, and tens of 1000’s are signing up. Ukrainians have been requested to make Molotov cocktails. And there have been tearful scenes at airports in western Ukraine as wives kissed their husbands goodbye earlier than they headed to entrance.

The nation has rallied round its president, Mr. Zelensky, a former comic.

To him and different officers, the target of the Russian invasion of a neighboring nation that possessed no navy risk is to topple the federal government.

Mr. Zelensky has mentioned that he’s “goal no. 1.”

As battles have been waged across the metropolis on Saturday morning, there have been stories of clashes close to town’s practice station and alongside a central thoroughfare, Bohdan Khmelnitsky Road, main from Victory Sq. towards town middle, in line with the witness accounts. Alongside that avenue, nearer to town middle, bursts of gunfire might be heard via the night time.

“We’re stopping the horde, as far as we are able to,” the secretary of the Ukrainian Safety and Protection Council, Oleksy Danilov, mentioned round 7 a.m. “The scenario is below management of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and residents of Kyiv.”

In dozens of interviews within the tense hours earlier than the invasion and within the days after, Ukrainians struggled to grasp how a rustic at peace so all of a sudden discovered itself at warfare. For a lot of Ukrainians, the reply was present in Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin.

That is Mr. Putin’s warfare. However what frightened folks maybe as a lot as the specter of missiles and bombs was that they didn’t know what he wished.

The worry was evident within the drive from Kyiv to a small village exterior town. Navy convoys had changed households occurring trip or visiting pals. The place as soon as Kyiv was often called a metropolis the place the music performed a contact too loud in its cafes, the incessant wail of air raid sirens drowned out all pleasure.

The worry was evident within the faces of the folks searching for security in Western Ukraine, after they emerged from 20-hour practice rides in packed carriages that have been stored pitch-black to keep away from being concentrating on by Russian rockets.

From Lviv within the west to Odessa within the south and Kharkiv and practically all factors in between, folks huddled in air raid shelters and lined up and financial institution machines and stocked up on necessities.

Whereas the Russians, for the second, weren’t answerable for any metropolis, it was solely the primary part of a battle that would stretch into weeks or longer.