Russian bombs and missiles destroyed the Chechen capital of Grozny in 19 and, in 2016, the Syrian rebel stronghold of Aleppo. None of the perpetrators of war crimes in Chechnya, where the Kremlin crushed an independence movement at the cost of tens of thousands of lives, were ever prosecuted in Russia. In Russia, however, such acts are rarely investigated or even acknowledged, let alone punished, our Moscow bureau chief, Anton Troianovski, writes. Pyotr Andryushchenko, an adviser to the mayor, said troops were still fighting from two other factories, Azovmash and Illich, elsewhere in the city.Ĭapturing Mariupol would be a major victory for Russia, allowing it to create a strategically important land bridge between eastern Ukraine and Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014. In the south, Ukrainian fighters were holed up in a sprawling, smoldering steel plant, one of the last redoubts of Ukrainian forces in the besieged city of Mariupol. Missile attacks also struck Lviv, in Ukraine’s west, and Kharkiv, in the northeast. “Our servicemen are holding out,” he said, adding that Russian forces had broken through the front at only two points. The Russian assault stretched along nearly the entire, 300-mile front line in the Donbas and Kharkiv regions, said Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council. “Now we can state that the Russian forces have started the battle for the Donbas that they have been getting ready for a long time,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address.
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