The war in Ukraine intensified on Sunday, as Russian troops entered the country’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, and Vladimir Putin unleashed a wave of attacks on airfields and fuel facilities.
Kharkiv residents were urged to stay indoors by governor Oleg Sinegubov, who said “there has been a breakthrough in light equipment including in the central part of the city”. A nine-storey building was reportedly hit, with one woman killed.
Russian forces also blew up a gas pipeline in the city, the Ukrainian state service of special communications said, prompting the government to warn of a potential “environmental catastrophe” and to urge people to protect themselves from the smoke by covering their windows.
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Sunday that Russia was bombarding residential areas in Ukraine, but vowed “we will fight as long as it takes to liberate the country”.
In an address posted online Zelenskiy said the past night in Ukraine had been “brutal” with bombing and shooting of residential areas and civilian infrastructure.
“Today, there is not a single thing in the country that the occupiers do not consider an acceptable target. They fight against everyone. They fight against all living things – against kindergartens, against residential buildings and even against ambulances.”
Air raid sirens sounded in Kyiv early on Sunday, hours after the US, Britain and European countries announced tougher sanctions targeting Russian banks, including barring some from the Swift international payments system.
Just south of the capital, flames leaped from an oil depot near the Zhuliany airport, according to the office of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and the mayor of the nearby town of Vasylkiv.
As huge pre-dawn explosions rocked areas south of the capital, people took shelter in cellars and subway stations as fears rose of an imminent full-scale assault by Russian forces.
The attacks suggested Russian troops had begun the next phase of their invasion, which has been slower than the Kremlin had anticipated due to fierce resistance.
Amid pressure on Ukraine’s allies to approve more robust sanctions against Russia, the US, European Union and Britain agreed to block “selected” Russian banks from the Swift global financial messaging system, which is used to move money around more than 11,000 banks and other financial institutions worldwide.
The countries also agreed to impose “restrictive measures” to prevent the Russia’s central bank from deploying its international reserves “in ways that undermine the impact of our sanctions”.
Germany and Italy had been reluctant to approve Swift measures over concerns Russia could cut off key gas supplies.
In a decisive break with the past, German chancellor Olaf Scholz announced on Sunday a €100bn special fund for the armed forces that would raise his country’s defence spending to above 2% of GDP, a longstanding Nato pledge Berlin has failed to meet.
A dramatic appeal for help by Zelenskiy to EU leaders may have been decisive in persuading reluctant governments to go for more sweeping sanctions. The Ukrainian president told the EU’s heads of state and government last week that with Kyiv encircled it may be the last time they would see him. “I think the intervention by President Zelenskiy will be part of history,” an EU official said. “It was very emotional, the leaders were deeply impacted, the silence in the room was impressive.”
“My opinion is that it made the difference to create this dynamic that we see today with leaders approving the transfer of delivery of weapons, Swift being on the list, and my guess is that it will continue”.
Swift said it was preparing to implement the measures in the coming days. “We are engaging with European authorities to understand the details of the entities that will be subject to the new measures and we are preparing to comply upon legal instruction,” it said in a statement.
The EU will discuss later on Sunday closing its airspace to Russia. Around three quarters of member states have already done so, with Belgium and Finland becoming the latest to join the list.
In Kyiv, terrified men, women and children sought safety inside their homes and underground, while the government maintained a 39-hour curfew.
Ukrainian officials said 198 civilians, including three children, had been killed since Russia invaded on Thursday, and warned Russian saboteurs were active in Kyiv.
Fighting on Kyiv’s outskirts suggested that small Russian units were trying to clear a path for the main forces. A tweet by the English-language Kyiv Independent newspaper said the capital was still “under [the] control of Ukrainian military and territorial defence forces. Mykola Povoroznyk, first deputy head of Kyiv City State Administration, says there were a few clashes with saboteurs overnight”.
More than 150,000 Ukrainians have so far fled for Poland, Moldova and other neighbouring countries, with the UN warning that the number of displaced people could reach 4 million if the fighting escalates.
Olga, 36, was among hundreds to have crossed the Danube river with her three young children into neighbouring Romania. “My husband came with us as far as the border, before returning to Kyiv to fight,” she said.
The US pledged an additional $350m in military assistance to Ukraine, while Germany said it would send missiles and anti-tank weapons, in a major U-turn from its longstanding policy of not exporting weapons to war zones.
Turkey referred to the Russian invasion as a “war” on Sunday, marking a change in its stance that observers suggested could pave the way for a ban on Russian ships in the Dardanelles and Bosphorus straits connecting the Mediterranean and Black sea, a key demand from Kyiv.
As Russia’s international isolation deepened, Muscovites laid flowers in memory of the leading opposition politician and anti-war campaigner, Boris Nemtsov, on the 7th anniversary of his murder near the Kremlin walls.
The UN security council is due to vote on Sunday to call for a rare emergency special session of the UN general assembly to discuss the Russian invasion.
With no veto option, the move needs only nine votes in favour and is likely to pass, diplomats said, with the meeting expected to be held on Monday.
The weekend has seen smaller acts of defiance and yet more support for Ukraine from overseas.
And a Ukrainian company in charge of building and maintaining roads said it was removing all road signs that could be used by invading Russian forces to find their way around the country. The company, Ukravtodor, said in a Facebook post: The enemy has poor communications, they cannot navigate the terrain. Let us help them get straight to hell.”
