At least 140,000 residential buildings in Ukraine destroyed or damaged. More than 3.5 million people left homeless. More than 12 million displaced. New tallies were added Tuesday to the merciless accounting that measures the losses from Russia’s invasion.
Each day, the bloodshed, dislocation and devastation grow. Two civilians were killed and five others badly injured trying to flee Russian-held territory in the southern Kherson region, Ukrainian officials said Tuesday. The administrator of the neighboring Kryvyi Rih region said Russian forces had fired on their red minibus at “point-blank range.”
In the east, the focus of recent Russian offensives, an emergency evacuation train carrying “women, children, elderly people, many people with reduced mobility” made its way on Tuesday morning to safer territory in the west, Iryna Vereshchuk, a deputy prime minister, said in a statement.
President Volodymyr Zelensky has pleaded with some 200,000 civilians in the east to evacuate the already depopulated areas near the front lines, where Russian artillery has laid waste to whole towns. Those who remain are disproportionately the old, the infirm, the Russian sympathizers or the merely stubborn. Most already lack essential infrastructure such as power, heat and clean water.If they wait until cold weather sets in this fall, Ms. Vereshchuk said — by which time Russia may have resumed major offensive operations — there will be little the government in Kyiv can do for them.
A month after seizing full control of the Luhansk region, the easternmost part of Ukraine, President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russian forces are regrouping for an expected push to conquer what they do not already hold of the neighboring Donetsk region. But the combat never fully lets up, and every day the Russians still pound targets around the country.The Ukrainian military said on Tuesday that it had repelled multiple attempts by the Russians to advance on the city of Bakhmut, in the Donetsk region. In the south, Ukrainian forces have driven the Russians back and are expected to make a major push to retake the strategic city of Kherson.
President Biden on Monday announced $550 million more in armsfor Ukraine, bringing to more than $8 billion the American investment in the war effort since Russia invaded on Feb. 24. The arrival of advanced, long-range artillery from the United States and its allies has helped the Ukrainians stabilize their defensive positions in the east and begin to mount a counteroffensive in the south.
The latest U.S. arms transfer will include ammunition for the HIMARS rocket launchers that have been used to destroy Russian command posts and ammunition depots, as well as for American 155-millimeter howitzers already in use by Ukrainian troops, said John F. Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council.