Kharkiv is a majority Russian-speaking city in Ukraine’s northeast — precisely the kind of place Putin claims to be liberating from the country’s Western-leaning government.
Heavy fighting continues in and around the city, with Russian forces attempting to encircle the major objective and using long-range missile fire in the process, a senior defense official said Monday.
The reports of rocket attacks came as the Ukraine invasion was causing growing problems for the Kremlin, a development experts have warned may lead Russian President Vladimir Putin to pursue more aggressive tactics.
Moscow has poured troops and armor into Ukraine since launching an unprovoked assault on its neighbor last week, but has had its advance slowed by determined resistance from Kyiv’s military and bands of civilians who have joined in to defend their homeland.
Russians have taken to the streets in protest, many of them being arrested by Putin’s security services. And the Russian economy has been tanking in the face of global sanctions and market panic.
United Nations human rights chief Michelle Bachelet said Monday that 102 civilians, including seven children, had been killed across Ukraine since Thursday. Those figures were almost certainly an undercount, she said.
Meanwhile, more than a half a million people had fled the country of 44 million in the wake of the Russian attack, the U.N.’s refugee agency said.
Russia says it has only targeted military installations in Ukraine. Although residential areas have undoubtedly been hit too, before Monday Moscow had not resorted to the kind of tactics it deployed in Chechnya around the turn of the millennium and Syria after 2015.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
