Zelensky warns Moscow it is sowing a deep hatred for Russia in Ukraine
CBC
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky angrily warned Moscow that it is sowing a deep hatred for Russia among his people, as constant artillery barrages and aerial bombings are reducing cities to rubble, killing civilians and driving others into shelters, leaving them to scrounge for food and water to survive.
"You are doing everything so that our people themselves leave the Russian language, because the Russian language will now be associated only with you, with your explosions and murders, your crimes," Zelensky said in an impassioned video address late Saturday.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine has ground into a war of attrition in many places, with the toll on civilians rising as Moscow seeks to pound cities into submission from entrenched positions.
Russian rockets struck the western Ukrainian city of Lviv on Saturday while U.S. President Joe Biden visited neighbouring Poland, serving as a reminder that Moscow is willing to strike anywhere in Ukraine despite its claim to be focusing its offensive on the country's east.
Early Sunday, a chemical smell still lingered in the air as firefighters in Lviv sprayed water on a burned section of an oil facility hit in the Russian attack.
A security guard at the site, Yaroslav Prokopiv, said he saw three rockets strike and destroy two oil tanks but no one was hurt.
"The third strike threw me to the ground," he said.
Russia's back-to-back airstrikes shook the city that has become a haven for an estimated 200,000 people who have had to flee their hometowns. Lviv had been largely spared since the invasion began, although missiles struck an aircraft repair facility near the main airport a week ago.
In the dim, crowded bomb shelter under an apartment block a short ways from the first blast site, Olana Ukrainets, a 34-year-old IT professional, said she couldn't believe she had to hide again after fleeing from the northeastern city of Kharkiv, one of the most bombarded cities of the war.
"We were on one side of the street and saw it on the other side," she said. "We saw fire. I said to my friend, 'What's this?' Then we heard the sound of an explosion and glass breaking. We tried to hide between buildings. I don't know what the target was."
Two cities on opposite ends of the country are seeing some of the worst suffering at the moment, Chernihiv in the north — strategically located on the road from the Belarusian border to the capital, Kyiv — and Mariupol in the south, a key port city on the Sea of Azov.
Both are encircled by Russian forces, but still holding out.
Chernihiv has been under attack since the early days of the invasion and over the last week, Russia destroyed the main vehicular bridge leading out of the city and rendered a nearby pedestrian bridge impassable, cutting off the last route for civilians to flee, or for food and medicine to be brought in.
Chernihiv's remaining residents are terrified that each blast, bomb and body that lies uncollected on the streets ensnares them in the same macabre trap of unescapable killings and destruction.
