KYIV, Ukraine — Under incongruously bright skies, Ukrainian forces fought fiercely Saturday to protect and maintain control of their country’s capital from Russian troops as sporadic explosions and gunfire shook parts of the city and an apartment tower took a direct hit from a shell.
Ukraine’s outgunned military desperately tried to fend off an advance by invading forces on Kyiv’s northern outskirts. Skirmishes were reported in other parts of the beleaguered city. Shops were closed, nervous reservists clutched battered AK-47s in the streets and makeshift checkpoints made of piled-up tires sprang up to slow any Russian infiltration.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tried to rally his compatriots, appearing in a video shot on a Kyiv street to demonstrate that he had not abandoned the city and to urge Ukrainians to resist.
“We aren’t going to lay down weapons. We will protect the country,” Zelenskyy said. “It’s our land, our country, our children. And we will defend all of that.”
Tens of thousands of Ukrainians have already fled west, some crossing into Poland and Romania, but thousands have also responded to Zelenskyy’s call to take up arms to push back against the Russian blitz in what is Europe’s biggest ground war since World War II.
On Kyiv’s Lobanovsky Avenue, a shell slammed into an apartment block about 8 a.m. Saturday, obliterating a chunk of the building between the 16th and 21st floors and wounding six people, a spokeswoman for the Ukrainian Rescuers agency said. Glass, hunks of cement and personal belongings from the destroyed units carpeted the boulevard below.
About 80 people were evacuated from the tower, which also houses a travel agency, a sushi restaurant and a gym. The exploded round turned a 16th-floor apartment into a smoke-filled maw of distressed masonry and rebar; on the 18th floor, a wall dangled and swung gently in the wind like a cement curtain.
It was the latest in the tally of civilian targets hit by Russian forces, despite Moscow’s insistence that its troops have aimed their massive firepower only at military installations.
“I don’t sleep these days, so I was awake beside my wife — she’s nine months pregnant — and reading the news when I heard this huge bang and the building shook,” said Eugene Limar, a 31-year-old programmer who lived on the 22nd floor. He was rushing down the stairs with two suitcases in hand, barely pausing a moment to speak to a reporter.
“I just dumped everything in these bags and we’re leaving,” he said.
Moments after he spoke, a fusillade of shots rang out in the distance, causing passersby to scurry for cover. A black column of smoke rose a small distance away to the north.
Three days into their large-scale assault by air, land and sea, Russian forces are apparently trying to encircle Kyiv in a campaign to depose Zelenskyy’s democratically elected government and install a pliant regime. Besides the capital, other major Ukrainian cities, including Kharkiv in the northeast, have come under attack from a military of vastly superior numbers and weaponry. Russian forces have mounted deadly air and missile strikes from the north, east and south.
Nearly 200 people have been killed and more than 1,000 wounded since the offensive began, Ukraine’s health minister said Saturday. Russia has not issued any casualty figures.
The U.S., the European Union and other allies, including Japan and Australia, have imposed sanctions that they say will inflict heavy damage on Russia’s economy. Some countries have also shipped arms to Ukraine to aid it in its effort to remain an independent nation.
But it’s become clear to Ukrainians that the actual fight — and the blood to be shed — is theirs alone.
“America isn’t here. The European Union isn’t here,” said Alexander, a 24-year-old hotel employee in Kharkiv who declined to give his last name. “So we’re fighting on our own.”
In Kyiv, Mayor Vitali Klitschko, a former boxing champion, vowed to stay and defend his city.
“The enemy wants to bring the capital and us to our knees,” Klitschko said. “I believe in Ukraine, I believe in my country and I believe in my people.”
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(Bulos reported from Kyiv and Chu from London.)
