3.6.22
Russia's tactics in Ukraine have focused in recent days on damaging the country's infrastructure, and as Sunday began, Ukrainian officials said hundreds of thousands of homes had their gas turned off. The news came shortly after Ukrainian officials warned that Russian forces could be moving to seize the dam of a hydroelectric power station north of Kyiv, the New York Times reported. The threat to the power plant is part of what Ukrainian officials believe is an effort by Russian forces to control infrastructure. Defense officials in the United Kingdom said they believe Russia is targeting populated areas in multiple locations, including Kharkiv, Chernihiv and Mariupol in an effort to break Ukrainian morale, according to a statement released early Sunday. "Russia has previously used similar tactics in Chechnya in 1999 and Syria in 2016, employing both air and ground-based munitions," the statement said. It also credited the scale and strength of the Ukrainian resistance for targeting Russian supply lines and slowing the advance of ground forces. "There is a realistic possibility that Russia is now attempting to conceal fuel trucks as regular support trucks to minimise losses," the statement read.
Ukraine and Russia will engage in talks aimed at negotiating a cease-fire and safe passage for civilian evacuations on Monday, a Ukraine official said, after the evacuation of the southeastern city of Mariupol was halted. The Ukrainian president's office said Saturday that Russia continued shelling the area in violation of a cease-fire. The shelling intensified into Saturday night, according to Mariupol's mayor, who said Russian airplanes were "dropping bombs on residential areas." The war in Ukraine has now sent 1.5 million refugees out of the country, the UN reported Sunday. Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, called the situation "the fastest growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War II."
