Ukrainian Forces Slow Russian Advance-Mass Flight Into Poland
 |
| Ukrainian Soldier asks for help as a housing building lights up on fire after a missile from Russian Plane. Putin is now hitting the neighborhood and housing building with the excuse there might be weapons there. He comes up with an excuse for everything. Now the Jewish Ukrainian for President of Ukraine is a Nazi and drug dealer. Soon Putin will be a saint for all the evil people he has killed. Actually, this is a Soviet Union playbook where Putin worked for the KGB. |
Ukrainian forces slow Russian advance on three cities. Russian is about 20-30 Miles from the Capital where Putin has ordered for the killing of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his family according to Zelenskyy.
Ukraine’s defense forces, outmanned and outgunned, waged a ferocious resistance to the Russian invasion on Saturday, battling to keep control of the capital, Kyiv, and other cities. So far, it seems their efforts have been effective. There was intense street fighting, and bursts of gunfire and explosions could be heard across Kyiv on Saturday, while the latest Western intelligence information said the Russian advance had been stalled. Here are the latest developments:
By Saturday afternoon, the speed of Russia’s advance in Ukraine had slowed, likely because of logistical difficulties and “strong Ukrainian resistance,” Britain’s ministry of defense said in a statement based on intelligence updates. Most of the more than 150,000 Russian forces that had massed around Ukraine are now fighting in the country, but those troops are “increasingly frustrated by their lack of momentum” as they face stiff Ukrainian resistance, a Pentagon official said.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in a video that his country’s fighters had “withstood and successfully repelled enemy attacks.”
But the Kremlin said that Russian forces were resuming their advance on Ukraine on Saturday, claiming that President Vladimir V. Putin had ordered a pause on Friday while possible talks with Ukraine were being considered. Russia has established attack lines into three cities: Kyiv in the north, Kharkiv in the northeast and Kherson in the south.
Videos and photos showed a residential building struck by a missile in southwestern Kyiv, about 1.5 miles from Sikorsky Memorial Airport. At least six people were injured and dozens more evacuated, according to emergency services.
Mayor Vitali Klitschko of Kyiv imposed a curfew from 5 p.m. local time Saturday until 8 a.m. on Monday as the battle for the capital rages. He warned that “all civilians who are on the street during the curfew will be considered members of the enemy’s sabotage and reconnaissance groups.”
Across Ukraine, people huddled in air-raid shelters, lined up at bank machines and stocked up on essentials. Many have also fled to Poland, Moldova and Romania.
 |
The spectacle of a mass flight out of Ukraine was resonating deeply in the Middle East on Saturday, with many taking to social media to express their sympathy and commiserate with the plight of those now forced to flee their homes amid a Russian military invasion.
But in a region that has been plagued by two decades of seemingly endless wars, the empathy was tinged with bitterness from some who saw the United States and its European allies taking a more compassionate stance toward the Ukrainians than they had in recent years toward Arab and Muslim migrants trying desperately to reach safety on Europe’s shores.
Images of ravaged cities from Syria and Iraq to Libya and Yemen circulated online, with memes and comments accusing the United States and Western democracies of stoking violence and destabilizing these countries while evading responsibility and upholding double standards, especially in their treatment of refugees.
As neighboring European countries swiftly opened their borders to tens of thousands of Ukrainians, Ayman Mohyeldin, an Egyptian-American television host on MSNBC with hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, said in a Twitter post, “So what you’re saying is that Europe knows how to humanely and compassionately welcome a large and sudden influx of refugees escaping war?”
To be fair, not a few commenters acknowledged that some European countries, like Germany, had been generous in resettling hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern migrants. A wave of asylum seekers from the wars in Syria and Iraq made their way to Europe in 2015 and 2016 and the European Union took in more than a million refugees over that 2-year period, most of them Syrians, with Germany receiving the bulk.
But Arab critics said that migrants from Muslim and Arab countries were often deemed a threat, rejected, and at times confronted with force and violence as they tried to enter Europe.
“What’s happening in Ukraine is incredibly tragic and heart-wrenching to watch,” said Rana Khoury, a Syrian-American postdoctoral associate researcher who focuses on the study of war and displacement at Princeton University. “But like many others, I also saw how these same countries who have put up so many obstacles to refugees fleeing conflicts in the Middle East open their borders to Ukrainians.”
Comments