(CN) — Russia on Wednesday stepped up its attack on Ukraine with catastrophic bombing of cities, causing more civilian deaths, while it slowly moved a massive convoy of weaponry closer to the capital Kyiv in preparation for a bloody assault on a heavily guarded city of 3 million people.
Russian forces reportedly seized Kherson, the first major urban center that its troops have claimed, though Ukraine said the battle for the city continued. Kherson's mayor called for humanitarian corridors to be opened to allow the besieged city's residents to flee.
More than 2,000 civilians, including women and children, have been killed so far, according to Ukraine’s emergency service. In a statement, it said hundreds of structures including transport facilities, hospitals, kindergartens and homes have been destroyed.
Kherson lies at the mouth of the Dnieper River on the Black Sea and close to Crimea, a peninsula Russia annexed in 2014 during the chaotic months of the “Maidan Revolution,” events that led to an eight-year simmering conflict between Ukrainian forces and an armed rebellion by ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine claiming to be independent. Inability to resolve that conflict is partly to blame for Russian President Vladimir Putin's brutal invasion.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday urged his people to resist the invaders. He has declared martial law in the country, ordered all males between the ages of 18 and 60 to fight and stopped them from leaving the country. Ukrainians are being told to attack Russian troops with Molotov cocktails, guns and any other means and it appears many are heeding the call to resist.
The worst shelling by artillery and aerial bombing took aim at Mariupol in the south and Kherkiv, an industrial and high-tech city in northeastern Ukraine on the border with Russia.
Mariupol is a port city on the Sea of Azov and within a region claimed by Russian rebels in Donetsk, one of two self-declared republics recognized by Putin at the start of the invasion last week. Information has been limited from Mariupol, but it is believed that some of Ukraine’s most fierce fighters, among them hardcore volunteer militia groups, have tried to hold the city against Russian troops.
On Wednesday, the BBC spoke with the city’s deputy mayor and he described the city as destroyed by bombing and on the verge of a “humanitarian catastrophe.” He said Mariupol had come under 15 hours of continuous bombardment by Russian forces.
“The Russian army is working through all their weapons here – artillery, multiple rocket launch systems, airplanes, tactical rockets. They are trying to destroy the city,” Serhiy Orlov told the BBC.
He said the attack had cut off water and power supplies to parts of the city and that residential districts on the city's left bank had been “nearly totally destroyed.”
“We cannot count the number of victims there, but we believe at least hundreds of people are dead,” he said.
Mariupol sits between lands occupied by pro-Russian Ukrainian forces in Donetsk and the annexed peninsula of Crimea, making it a must-win city in Russia’s plans to carve out a new state in eastern Ukraine dominated by ethnic Russians. Following the Maidan Revolution in 2014, pro-Russian separatists in Donbas declared they wanted to reconstitute Novorossiya, as the eastern territory of Ukraine was known during the Russian empire. Since the end of the Soviet Union, the large population of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine has clamored for more autonomy.
The city of Kherkiv also was seeing intense fighting and bombing. Kherkiv is also in eastern Ukraine and sits close to the border with Russia along Ukraine’s northern border.
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