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As thousands flee the besieged Kyiv suburb of Irpin, allegations are emerging of Russian forces looting, hiding military equipment in residential areas, deploying snipers and cutting water and power as they seek to use the area as a potential launchpad to invade the capital. Ukraine on Tuesday accused Russia of firing on civilian routes for the fourth day in a row.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the British Parliament on Tuesday via video, receiving a standing ovation for a speech that recalled a stirring address by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill during World War II. “We will continue fighting for our land, whatever the cost,” Zelensky said. “We will fight in the forests, on the shores, in the streets.”
His wife, Olena Zelenska, in an open letter to the global media, condemned the “mass murder” of Ukrainian civilians, including children.
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NATO chief warns Russia against hitting supply lines flowing into Ukraine
Return to menuNATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said a Russian attack against NATO territories or troops helping to send arms and munitions to Ukraine would be considered an attack against all 30 members of the alliance, which includes the United States.
Such action would be a dangerous escalation, he said Tuesday during an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Stoltenberg was visiting NATO troops conducting a live-fire training exercise in Adazi, Latvia, about 120 miles from the nearest Russian border, with the prime ministers of Canada, Spain and Latvia.
“There is a war going on in Ukraine and, of course, supply lines inside Ukraine can be attacked,” the secretary general said. “An attack on NATO territory, on NATO forces, NATO capabilities” that are sending weapons to Ukraine would trigger Article 5, the NATO clause that obliges member states to assist other members that are attacked.
“To make sure there is no room for miscalculation in Moscow, NATO has significantly strengthened our presence in the eastern part of our alliance,” Stoltenberg said at a separate news conference earlier Tuesday. “We have 130 jets at high alert, over 200 ships in the high north to the Mediterranean, and thousands of additional troops in the region.”
NATO has been reluctant to send supplies to Ukrainian troops via air convoys that fly over Ukrainian airspace, lest such action invite a Russian air attack that entangles the alliance in a shooting war with Moscow. The allies instead have been relying on land routes from Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, NATO countries that share borders with Ukraine.
Western defense officials have been tight-lipped about what weapons, and how many of them, they have been transporting into Ukraine. “We don’t necessarily tell you exactly what, where, when and how,” British Armed Forces Minister James Heappey said in an interview with British Forces radio.
Russia bars purchases of dollars by citizens in sign of hard-currency pinch
Return to menuAs it scrambles to keep the ruble’s value from plummeting further, Russia’s central bank on Wednesday announced that it is prohibiting citizens from using rubles to buy dollars and other hard currencies for the next six months.
“Banks will not sell hard currency to citizens during the period of the temporary order,” the central bank said in a statement posted to its website after midnight Moscow time. The order is to expire Sept. 9.
The central bank said it also will limit to $10,000 the amount of U.S. dollars that clients can withdraw from hard-currency accounts at Russian banks. Anyone wanting to withdraw more than that from a hard-currency account will have to take the balance in rubles, said the central bank, which is known as the Bank of Russia.
The measures are designed to prevent Russians from making a run for dollars as the ruble plummets to fresh lows in the wake of Western economic sanctions, which have limited the central bank’s access to its hard currency reserves.
Gunfire is audible in new video as civilians evacuate Sumy
Return to menuBursts of gunfire punctuate an otherwise calm scene of Romens’ka Street in Sumy, a city in northeastern Ukraine, according to a video verified by The Washington Post. The video, which was posted to Twitter on Tuesday, confirms shelling continued in the region as civilians tried to evacuate.
One humanitarian corridor, several miles from where this video was filmed, managed to open on Tuesday morning, said Dmytro Zhivitsky, the regional governor. In an update on the messaging app Telegram, Zhivitsky described a similar incident near a checkpoint along city’s outskirts in the “green corridor.”
He assured his followers the situation is calm, but cautioned that these examples prove “there is no hundred percent safety when it comes to moving out.”
Filmed from several stories above ground level, the footage reviewed by The Post shows a column of cars slowly moving down the street. Less than a second in, the first shots are clearly audible. Rapid gunfire continues as the person filming pans the camera, apparently searching for the sound’s origin.
“People are about to evacuate and he starts the fire!” the person filming says. Then the camera zooms in to show several large vehicles beyond the tree line that are surrounded by a cloud of smoke. The person says a tank is shooting and “driving into town!” It is not immediately clear from the video if the vehicles in the distance were tanks.
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