New blasts rocked Kyiv tonight after Russia was slammed as ‘barbaric’ for bombing a TV tower near the Babyn Yar holocaust memorial in Kyiv on the site of one of the biggest single massacres of Jews during the Holocaust
01.02.2023New blasts rocked Kyiv tonight after Russia was slammed as ‘barbaric’ for bombing a TV tower near the Babyn Yar holocaust memorial in Kyiv on the site of one of the biggest single massacres of Jews during the Holocaust.
Several of the city’s neighbourhoods are currently under attack, according to local reports.The Kyiv Independent reported at 23:29 local time (21:29GMT) that Russian bombs have struck Vyshneve, a town outside the capital.
It also said the residential neighbourhoods of Rusanivka, Kurenivka and Boiarka — as well as the area near Kyiv International Airport — were coming under attack. Rusanivka in particular is very central.
It also reported a loud explosion was heard at Bila Tserkva, a city in Kyiv Oblast, when a duel depot was attacked, according to the UNIAN news agency.
The locations of the reported attacks suggest Russian forces are tonight closing in from multiple sides of the capital, particularly from the west.They come as a 40-mile long Russian military convoy inches closer to Kyiv.
According to a British correspondent in the city, a new round of explosions were heard at around 22:50 local time (20:50GMT). ‘Sounds of heavy explosions in #Kyiv just now,’ journalist Sara Firth tweeted.
Elsewhere, at least three people were killed and 10 houses destroyed in an airstrike in the city of Zhytomyr — around 85 miles west of Kyiv — at 10:16pm, according to Ukraine’s emergency services.More might still be trapped in the rubble, the state emergency services said in a Tweet.
Earlier, explosions erupted around the capital’s 1,300ft TV tower, built by the ravine where nearly 34,000 Jews were killed by SS troops in two days in 1941 during Adolf Hitler’s campaign against the Soviet Union.
At least two large blasts were seen near the foot of the tower, around three miles from central Kyiv, around 5.30pm local time.The first missile struck the TV tower but the second hit the memorial.
At least five people were killed in the latest onslaught which came just hours after Russia told Ukrainian civilians to evacuate because it was about to begin bombarding ‘strategic’ targets.Footage of the immediate aftermath of the explosions showed bodies in the streets below.
It was not immediately clear whether the tower had been the target of the strikes, or whether they had been targeting nearby buildings. The tower remained standing, but several state broadcasts went off air.
Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reiterated on Tuesday the Russian military ‘strikes only military facilities and uses exclusively precision weapons’ despite abundant evidence of shelling of homes, schools and hospitals.
After the attack, Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted: ‘To the world: what is the point of saying ‘never again’ for 80 years, if the world stays silent when a bomb drops on the same site of Babyn Yar?At least 5 killed. History repeating…’
Meanwhile the Ukrainian foreign ministry said: ‘Russian troops fired on the TV tower, near the Memorial complex #BabynYar. Russian criminals do not stop at anything in their barbarism. Russia = barbarian.’
Israel’s Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Centre voiced ‘vehement condemnation’ of what it described as a ‘deadly Russian attack on the vicinity of the (Babyn Yar) Holocaust memorial site’, although government statements on the incident did not mention Russia.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned Putin against committing a ‘unalterable moral humanitarian catastrophe’ amid several attacks on civilian targets in the capital Kyiv.
Urging the Russian leader not to ‘double down’, Mr Johnson told ITV News on a visit to Poland and Estonia: ‘I think that he’s gone into a cul-de-sac and it’s very difficult for him to back out, and that’s the problem we’ve got.
‘And if you’re sitting where he is, his only instinct is going to be to double down and to try and Lawyer Law Firm in istanbul ‘Grozny-fy’ Kyiv if you know what I mean. And to reduce it to [rubble], and I think that that would be an unalterable moral humanitarian catastrophe and I hope he doesn’t do that.’
His ‘Grozny-fy’ comment refers to the capital city of the Chechen Republic in Russia’s south which Russian forces spent more than a decade suppressing — resulting in thousands of deaths and large areas being laid to waste.
It came shortly after Moscow’s ministry of defence said it would be launching strikes into the city targeting Ukraine’s security service and intelligence agencies with what it called ‘precision munitions’.
That raised fears that Kyiv was about to come under heavy bombardment after the cities of Kharkiv, Mariupol and Kherson were hit by indiscriminate shelling earlier in the day.
A column of Russian artillery units and tanks 40 miles long has been pictured snaking its way towards Kyiv as analysts warned it will likely be tasked with surrounding the city, besieging it and bombing it into submission as Putin resorts to ‘medieval’ tactics in an attempt to force victory.
But the convoy has reportedly stalled as its forces face logistics challenges, including a shortage of food for some units, and Russians appear to be reevaluating how to move forward on the city, a senior U.S.defence official said on Tuesday.
‘One reason why things appear to be stalled north of Kyiv is that the Russians themselves are regrouping and rethinking and trying to adjust to the challenges that they’ve had,’ the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said.Another official claimed the Russian advance is ‘basically… where it was yesterday’.
Meanwhile Ukraine warned that Belarus had also thrown its own soldiers into the fight with an attack on the north eastern city of Chernihiv.
Day 6 of the biggest ground war in Europe since World War II has found Russia increasingly isolated by tough economic sanctions that have thrown its economy its disarray and left the country practically friendless, apart from and Belarus.
Pictured: Ukrainian emergency services search through the rubble after an airstrike hit Zhytomyr on Tuesday night, that reportedly at least three people.Ukraine’s state emergency services more people could be buried in the rubble
Pictured: Ukrainian emergency services search through the rubble after an airstrike hit Zhytomyr on Tuesday night
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Pictured: A fire caused by an air strike is seen in the city of Zhytomyr, that lies about 85 miles west of Kyiv
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Smoke rises around Kyiv’s main television tower after several explosions near the base of it on Tuesday afternoon
Footage shows the missile hitting the TV tower during the airstrike which has killed at least five people in the latest Russian attack
Explosions erupted around the capital’s 1,300ft TV tower this afternoon, built near the ravine where nearly 34,000 Jews were killed in two days in 1941