On the second day of the war in Ukraine, launched by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, Kiev is already in the sights of the occupying forces. The first fighting took place in some places in the capital. In a residential area of Kiev, a dead civilian lay on a sidewalk. A little further on, paramedics were helping another, prisoner of a car crushed by an armored vehicle. Viktor Berbach, 58, said he witnessed in the morning, from his balcony, the passage of armored vehicles and the exchange of automatic weapons.
A civilian vehicle crushed, after the passage of a combat vehicle. It would be a group of Russian saboteurs.
NurPhoto via AFP
During the night, shelling also hit a 10-storey apartment building in the southeastern suburbs of Kiev, in the Poznyaky district, in an alignment of towers inherited from the Soviet era. “It caught fire,” says Sergiy Rozheskiy, who thinks it was a missile or a missile intercept.
A general view of a damaged residential building in Koshytsa Street, a suburb of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, where a military shell reportedly hit, February 25, 2022.
AFP
Ukrainian forces also reported fighting Russian armor units in two locations between 40 and 80 kilometers north of Kiev. Russian troops were also approaching the capital from the northeast and east, according to the Ukrainian military. The Chernobyl zone in particular fell.
Kiev ghost town
After the flight of many inhabitants Thursday, the center of Kiev, strong capital in normal times of some three million inhabitants and now under curfew, looked like a ghost town.
A man walks in the middle of a deserted street in central Kiev on February 25, 2022.
AFP
Armed and armored men were posted at the main crossroads near government buildings. Rare passers-by stopped to exchange the latest news, while sirens and explosions sounded in a cloud-laden sky.
“That night they started shelling civilian neighborhoods. It reminds us (the Nazi offensive) of 1941,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday morning in a video on social media, speaking the phrase in Russian, to the attention of the Russians.
Many find refuge in the underground metro. Or flee to train stations to the sounds of sirens announcing an imminent air raid.
People take shelter in metro stations amid Russia’s military intervention in Kiev, Ukraine, February 25, 2022.
Anadolu Agency via AFP
President Zelensky also praised the “heroism” of the population in the face of an invasion which, according to him, has already left at least 137 dead and 316 injured on the Ukrainian side, assuring that his soldiers were doing “their possible” to defend the country. “Russia will have to talk to us sooner or later,” he added. “The sooner this conversation begins, the smaller the losses for Russia itself.”
Scenes of weapons distribution have been observed around Kiev.