Russian forces seize control of Kherson: Mayor tells residents to obey Putin's soldiers and begs troops not to shoot civilians as huge explosion hits Kyiv and Russia's warships prepare amphibious assault on Odessa one week after start of the invasion

Russia has captured its first major city in Ukraine after a week of fighting, with Kherson - a regional capital of 300,000 people on the Black Sea - now under the control of Putin's forces. 

Igor Kolykhaiev, the city's mayor, said in an update around 1.a.m that 'armed visitors' had stormed a council meeting and imposed new rules including a strict curfew and urged citizens to follow them. But it was far from clear whether Ukrainian forces had totally withdrawn, with the UK MoD saying Thursday the situation is 'unclear'. 

If Kherson is under full Russian control, then it opens up Odessa - Ukraine's main port city and primary naval base - to an assault. Amphibious landing ships were seen forming up off the west coast of Crimea Thursday morning as US officials warned a major assault from the sea could come later in the day.

Meanwhile Kyiv and Kharkiv, Ukraine's two largest cities, remained under a heavy bombing campaign overnight with missiles striking civilian areas - including a train station in the Ukrainian capital being used to evacuate people from the city and as a shelter for those who cannot or have chosen not to leave.

Chernihiv, in the north west, and Mariupol, in the south, also remain under Ukrainian control despite being all-but surrounded by Russian forces and coming under heavy bombardment. The mayor of Mariupol said Thursday that Russian artillery fire has been so intense that they cannot even remove wounded people from the streets.

Vadym Boichenko accused the Russians of doing 'everything to block the exit of civilians' including blowing up the city's trains, leaving people stranded before the artillery opened fire. Evacuations continued elsewhere, however, with the UN estimating that 1million people have now fled Ukraine into neighbouring countries.  

Ukraine estimates that 2,000 civilians have been killed in fighting. The UN has confirmed 227 of those but said the true toll is likely far higher. War crimes prosecutors have opened a case into the deaths. 

Negotiators from both Ukraine and Russia are set to meet on the border with Belarus today for a second round of talks, after an initial summit on Monday failed to yield any result.

Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, issued a video address to the nation in the early hours of Thursday, giving an upbeat assessment of the war and calling on Ukrainians to keep up the resistance.

 

'We are a people who in a week have destroyed the plans of the enemy,' he said, in the clip posted on social media. 'They will have no peace here. They will have no food. They will have here not one quiet moment.'

Zelensky did not comment on whether the Russians have seized several cities, including Kherson. 'If they went somewhere, then only temporarily. We'll drive them out,' he said.

He said the fighting is taking a toll on the morale of Russian soldiers, who 'go into grocery stores and try to find something to eat.' He added: 'These are not warriors of a superpower. These are confused children who have been used,' while giving the death toll at 9,000 Russian troops. The US believes the toll is actually around 6,000. Moscow has admitted only 500 deaths.

His assessment of the Russian attack was shared by several US defence analysts who said the campaign had been mismanaged, under-supplied, ineffective, and led to Moscow suffering much-higher casualties in the first few days of fighting than had been anticipated.

 

Ahead of the invasion, Washington had warned that Russia's superior forces would be able to quickly overwhelm Ukraine's 200,000-strong army - taking out air defences, achieving superiority in the skies, and then raining death down on those below.

But none of that has come to pass. Ukraine's skies remain contested, US intelligence says, while attacks have been piecemeal with troops under-supplied and not fighting in a coordinated fashion, leading to large numbers of dead along with some abandoning their vehicles which have then been captured.

'This is a colossal intelligence failure that vastly underestimated Ukrainian resistance, and military execution has been terrible,' Michael Vickers, former US Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

'[Putin's] main attack has been underweighted. It's been piecemeal. His reconnaissance elements have been captured, columns have been destroyed,' he said. 'It's just a disaster, through and through.'

But many caution that Russia's initial failures could simply pre-sage a secondary phase of the fighting in which it uses superior numbers and force of arms to surround and bomb Ukrainian troops into submission, causing large civilian casualties. 

Yves Le Drian, the French foreign minister, agreed with that assessment today as he issued a warning that the 'worst' is still to come as Russia switches to a 'logic of siege' with major cities in danger of being surrounded. 

He spoke as Europe continued to step up its assistance to Ukraine, with Germany pledging another 2,700 anti-aircraft missiles to bolster the Ukrainian defences. That comes on top of 1,000 anti-tank weapons and 500 Stinger anti-aircraft weapons it has already sent, in a stunning reversal of its long-standing pledge not to supply weapons. 

Meanwhile a Bangladeshi sailor was killed in an attack on his vessel in the Ukrainian Black Sea port of Olvia, the state shipping company said Thursday.

The Banglar Samriddhi, a bulk carrier, arrived in the country on February 22, a day before Russia invaded, and has since been unable to leave.

Pijush Dutta, executive director of the Bangladesh Shipping Corporation, said the vessel was hit in a 'rocket or bomb' attack on Wednesday - though it was not clear who had opened fire.

The third engineer was killed and the bridge caught fire, he said, but the remaining 28 crew - all Bangladeshis - were still on board. 'The fire has been brought under control,' he added. 'Other crew in the ship are safe.'

In the early hours of Thursday a huge explosion rocked Kyiv - preceded by the blaring of air raid sirens at around 2am local time in multiple districts across the city. Kyiv's buildings were then lit up by a huge blast from a bomb.  

The Kyiv Independent reported that air raid alerts were issued in multiple regions included Kyiv Oblast, Lviv, Zhytomyr, Frankivsk, Chernihiv and Odessa.

Footage from the capital, filmed from windows overlooking the city, showed at least one massive explosion that lit up the night sky, and appeared to cause a shock-wave.  

In another video, captured by CBS News reporters moments after signing off following a report, two bursts of light could be seen over Kyiv. 

While the explosions were not filmed directly, the intensity of them was enough to shock the reporter and his film crew, who were some distance away from the blasts.

Hours earlier, a Russian missile struck near Kyiv's southern main rail station where thousands of women and children are being evacuated, Ukraine's state-run railway company Ukrzaliznytsya said in a statement. 

The station building suffered minor damage and the number of any casualties was not yet known, it said, adding trains were still operating despite the blast.

Ukraine's interior ministry adviser Anton Herashchenko said the blast was caused by wreckage from a downed Russian cruise missile, not a direct rocket strike. 

Trains continued to run. Herashchenko added the strike may have cut off central heating supply to parts of the Ukrainian capital amid freezing winter temperatures.

Unverified reports said two missiles were launched towards the headquarters of Ukraine's Ministry of Defense, with one being shot down. The HQ and the railway station sit across a road from one another in Kyiv.  

Forty miles from Kherson, in Mykolaiv, Ukrainian forces captured several Russian troops on Wednesday, where fierce fighting broke out in recent days.

The region's governor and a member of Ukraine's Parliament shared pictures with the captured soldiers. 

Roman Kostenko, a lawmaker and secretary of the Parliament's Committee on National Security, Defense and Intelligence, told CNN that a reconnaissance unit of the Russian GRU's 10th brigade had been intercepted on the outskirts of Mykolaiv.

'We encircled them and they gave themselves up,' he said. 

 

'They are with the SBU,' he said, referring to the Ukrainian security services. 

He said one of the five Russian soldiers had died, one was taken straight to hospital and three were alive. 

The capture of Kherson came as Western officials told CNN that they believe the Russian strategy is moving toward a 'slow annihilation' of the Ukrainian military.

They warned that the grinding pace of the conflict could see Russia resorting to the bombardment of cities and civilian targets.

Ukrainian forces have so far been able to stave off Russia's initial push, maintaining control of Kyiv and other major cities. 

Russia has lost roughly 3-5 percent of its tanks, aircraft, artillery and other military assets inside Ukraine, according to two US officials familiar with the latest intelligence. 

Ukraine has lost roughly 10 percent of its capabilities, and they remain massively outgunned and outmanned. 

And Russia is now bringing in heavier, more destructive weaponry and increasingly striking civilian infrastructure, after an initial focus on military targets, the officials said.

'The cruel military math of this will eventually come to bear, absent some intervention, absent some fundamental change in the dynamic,' one official said. 

Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine's foreign minister, told Secretary of State Antony Blinken in a call on Wednesday that Ukraine needs additional deliveries of weapons 'now,' Kuleba tweeted.

A senior intelligence official said: 'They need bullets. They need bandages. They're going to need fuel. They're going to need ammunition, in addition to the humanitarian support to help with medical assistance, sustaining hospitals, both for combat wounded and for civilians that are being hurt.

'And they're going to need a lot again in ammunition and the weapons resupply, because the Russian force is both numerically and qualitatively superior.' 

Moscow's isolation deepened, meanwhile, when most of the world lined up against it at the United Nations to demand it withdraw from Ukraine. 

And the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court opened an investigation into possible war crimes. 

President Joe Biden and his administration have stopped short of accusing the Kremlin of conducting war crimes in its invasion of Ukraine so far.

On Wednesday Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State, said instead they are 'looking very closely at what's happening' and 'documenting it.' 

He said it was 'shameful' that hospitals and residential buildings were being hit.

'We're looking very closely at what's happening in Ukraine right now, including what's happening to civilians,' Blinken said. 

'We're taking account of it, we're documenting it, and we want to ensure, among other things, that there's accountability for it.' 

He compared Russia's tactics in Ukraine to previous conflicts, where its forces were 'absolutely brutal in trying to cow the citizenry of a given country, and that includes at the very least indiscriminate targeting and potentially deliberate targeting as well.' 

A second round of talks aimed at ending the fighting was expected on Thursday, but there appeared to be little common ground between the two sides.

Russia reported its military casualties for the first time since the invasion began last week, saying nearly 500 of its troops have been killed and almost 1,600 wounded. 

Ukraine did not disclose its own military losses but said more than 2,000 civilians have died, a claim that could not be independently verified.

With fighting going on on multiple fronts across the country, Britain's Defense Ministry said Mariupol, a large city on the Azov Sea, was encircled by Russian forces. 

Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko said the attacks there had been relentless.

'We cannot even take the wounded from the streets, from houses and apartments today, since the shelling does not stop,' he was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying.

Meanwhile, the senior U.S. defense official said the immense column of hundreds of tanks and other vehicles appeared to be stalled roughly 16 miles from Kyiv and had made no real progress in the last couple of days.

The convoy, which earlier in the week had seemed poised to launch an assault on the capital, has been plagued with fuel and food shortages and has faced fierce Ukrainian resistance, the official said.

On the far edges of Kyiv, volunteer fighters well into their 60s manned a checkpoint to try to block the Russian advance.

'In my old age I had to take up arms,' said Andrey Goncharuk, 68. 

He said the fighters needed more weapons, but 'we'll kill the enemy and take their weapons.'

Russian warplanes bombed the village of Gorenka, a half-hour's drive from Ukraine's capital, Wednesday, leaving the bodies of villagers strewn among ruined homes, residents said.

In the northern city of Chernihiv, two cruise missiles hit a hospital, according to the Ukrainian UNIAN news agency 

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Ihor Kolykhaiev, mayor of Kherson, said on Wednesday that armed forces had taken control of his city

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The mayor of Kherson, Ihor Kolykhaiev, made a post on Facebook at around 7pm local time on Wednesday evening. The translation is done by Facebook itself

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A woman cries in the small basement of a house crowded with people seeking shelter from Russian airstrikes, outside the capital Kyiv, on Wednesday

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The remains of a destroyed Russian military convoy are seen on a street in Bucha, to the south of Kyiv, on Wednesday morning