Aftermath of an airstrike explosion in Kharkiv city on Tuesday 1 March, 2022. Source:Twitter
Russian bombs have exploded in front of an administrative building in Kharkiv, rocking Ukraine’s second largest city Tuesday morning. This is barely a day after Russian and Ukrainian delegates held peace talks on the border of Belarus.
The blast hit at about 8 a.m., two hours after the city’s curfew had lifted, according to an advisor to Ukraine’s interior minister, Anton Gerashchenko.
An online video showed what appeared to be a rocket striking directly in front of the city’s administrative building, creating a huge fireball that engulfed several cars driving through an area called Freedom Square.
The number of casualty from this latest strike cannot be immediately determined but the city’s mayor said there were dead and six people were injured, including one child.
Dramatic satellite images released by Maxar Technologies on Monday evening showed a massive convoy of Russian military vehicles stretching over 40 miles advancing towards Kyiv.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has accused Russia of war crimes for deliberately targeting civilians in its unrelenting bombardment of his country.
The prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague Karim Khan, announced Monday that possible war crimes or crimes against humanity in Ukraine will be investigated.
More than 500,000 refugees have fled Ukraine amid the conflict which broke out last Thursday, according to the UN Refugee Agency, and at least 160,000 have become internally displaced since the Russian offensive in Ukraine.
Nigeria has announced it will begin evacuation of its citizens in Ukraine from Wednesday 2nd March, but the Indian Embassy in Kyiv on Tuesday urged all Indian citizens who remained in the Ukrainian capital on Tuesday to leave “urgently today”.
The embassy wrote on Twitter that it had helped more than 1,000 students leave Kyiv for western Ukraine on Monday and urged those remaining to leave via “trains or through any other means available”.
Kharkiv, which is located less than 20 miles from the Russian border, in northeast Ukraine and home to 1.4 million people, was approached by Russian troops shortly after the invasion began last Thursday, but have constantly been repelled by Ukrainian forces.
