Putin troops wipe out entire city as invaders encircle the capital

Days of heavy bombardment have demolished much of Volnovakha - a small but strategically important city of 21,000 people.

A Ukrainian serviceman leaves a building damaged by shelling in Kyiv on Saturday. Picture: AFP

An entire city in eastern Ukraine has been wiped out in the Russian invasion, the regional governor said at the weekend.

Russian-backed separatists claimed on Friday to have captured Volnovakha. Days of heavy bombardment from the air and ground artillery assaults have demolished much of the small but strategically important city of 21,000 people.

Videos on social media showed Russian soldiers and armoured vehicles in the city, surrounded by mangled, burnt-out buildings.

Most of the civilians living there had managed to escape before they arrived, said Pavlo Kyrylenko, the governor of the Donetsk region, and barely anything was left of the city. “In general, Volnovakha with its infrastructure as such no longer exists,” he told Ukrainian television channel.

As the war dragged into its 18th day on Sunday, President Vladimir Putin’s forces are intensifying their efforts to take key cities including the besieged port of Mariupol, less than 65km south of Volnovakha, and expanding the offensive to new targets across the country.

Russian forces advanced ever closer to Kyiv from the north, west and northeast.

In Moscow, the Defence Ministry reported that Russian forces had advanced 12km over “a broad front” during the day, without specifying exactly where.

Both Ukrainian and Russian officials described the quickly worsening humanitarian situation as “catastrophic”. The brutal tactics mirror those used by Russia to overwhelm cities in Syria and Chechnya.

In a video address from Kyiv on Saturday, President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of waging a “war of annihilation” against his country.

He confirmed that Ukraine had lost about 1300 troops so far. Ukraine’s Foreign Minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said the country was ready to negotiate but would not “accept any ultimatums and surrender”.

Volnovakha lies between the city of Donetsk, the hub of the unrecognised separatist Donetsk People’s Republic, which violently broke away from Ukraine eight years ago, and the vital Ukrainian-controlled port of Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, which has been under siege since March 2.

In Mariupol the sick are dying from lack of water and medicine and are being buried where they fall by their neighbours.

The people have been cut off from electricity, gas, water and telephone and internet communications, their only contact with the outside world coming through aid agencies’ satellite phones and those belonging to the local administration. As of Friday, 1582 people had been killed.

Subjugating Mariupol, which had a population of almost half a million before the war, would create a land bridge for Mr Putin from western Russia to Crimea, which he seized in 2014. A member of aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres managed to get a voicemail message out to colleagues, which they shared with us.

“We saw people who died because of lack of medication,” said the aid worker, his voice calm but insistent. “There are a lot of such people inside Mariupol, many people who are killed and injured. They are just lying on the ground, and neighbours just digging a hole in the ground and putting the dead bodies inside.”

He said there had been no medical supplies or drinking water for more than a week, and residents were gathering water from the ground and boiling it to drink. The lack of communications meant no one knew what was happening to relatives, either elsewhere in the city or the rest of the country, and whether they were alive or dead.

In a new address to his people, Mr Zelensky said he had sent another team to try to get aid into the city, after previous attempts to co-ordinate a “humanitarian corridor” failed when it came under renewed Russian attack.

“We will try every day to save our people,” he said. “I am grateful to every driver who tries to accomplish this difficult mission.”

Russian bombing on Saturday came close to the Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent Mosque, where scores of civilians, mainly Turkish, had sought shelter.

According to the Ukrainian embassy in Turkey, 86 Turkish nationals, including 34 children, were among those who sought shelter in the mosque. The mosque itself had been hit by shellfire.

Mr Zelensky also said he had spoken to French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz about Ukraine’s application to join the EU, and had begged them to help secure the release of a Ukrainian mayor seized by the Russians.

Ivan Fedorow was taken away from his office in the city of Melitopol, which is now under Russian control. Two thousand residents defied Russian occupiers to protest there on Saturday.

Mr Zelensky also dwelt on the embarrassing and highly publicised losses sustained by the Russians in their invasion, as their slow-moving columns of tanks, heavy weapons and support vehicles are picked off by Western-supplied missile launchers and drones.

“This is the biggest blow to the Russian army in decades,” he said.

THE SUNDAY TIMES