KYIV, Ukraine — As Russian troops advanced from the north, this capital with its defiant president and citizen militias armed with rifles and homemade bombs was preparing a robust defense Thursday as talks to end the war stalled and relentless shelling battered coastal towns in the south.
Across Kyiv, major road and bridge junctions were blocked with streetcars, buses and garbage trucks. Near the ring road that surrounds the city, trucks with rocket launchers parked in fields and released a fusillade toward Russian forces’ position to the northwest. And as Russian troops pressed on outside the city, residents of Kyiv’s suburbs were feeling the strain.
“We’ve seen more civilians. Sometimes soldiers too, but much more civilians,” said Volodymyr Andriiets, deputy director of the main hospital in Brovary, 15 miles northwest of Kyiv’s center. “Bullet wounds, shrapnel wounds; the ones we’ve seen are very severe, because many of them we see an appendage amputated.”
