Now after the heavy shelling in the second-most populated city, Kharkiv, of Ukraine, Russian ground forces are aiming for the capital, Kyiv, as the forces wend their way closer, within 20 miles of the center of the Ukrainian capital on Monday, revealed by a new batch of satellite images. The convoy appears to be making steady progress along the war-scarred roads, including armored vehicles, tanks and towed artillery, leading to Kyiv. As troops from Kyiv await reinforcements, Russian artillery is causing severe damages to civilians and infrastructure in Kharkiv.
Although advances in the south seem to have slowed down in recent hours, Ukraine’s east is facing a new assault, on Mariupol, by Russian forces.
Ukraine’s President expressed his outrage at Russia’s actions, as he described the bombing at Kharkiv as a war crime. The President said that the unfair tactics of Russia will not be tolerated, wherein at the exact time of a full-fledged negotiation, one side hits the other with rocket artillery, keeping it completely synchronized with the negotiation process.
From both nations, the delegations had met near Ukraine’s border with Belarus and spoke for five hours without coming to any resolution but deciding on meeting soon again and holding discussions later.
According to local government officials, at least 11 people were killed and dozens hospitalized in the shelling. Monday evening, House lawmakers received a classified briefing from senior Biden administration officials, revealing a total of 1,500 civilian and military casualties have occurred since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Although the casualty count from the House briefing varied from other publicly available tolls, which could be attributed to on-the-ground worsening conditions and difficulty in gathering exact statistics.
As the forces continue to rain down shelling through Monday to Tuesday morning, Russia careens toward an economic crisis as the value of ruble plunges since several nations cut off some Russian banks from the international SWIFT financial messaging system, and severed the Kremlin’s access from its foreign currency reserves in the West.
On Thursday, President Biden had announced a package of sanctions and export controls coordinated with European and Asian allies, seeking to isolate Russian President Vladimir Putin, and to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. On Monday, Washington announced another round of sanctions, prohibiting institutions in the United States from doing business with Russia’s central bank.
The prohibitions by the Biden administrations could almost be seen as a dramatic and powerful economic warfare in response to the military invasion.
