The exodus out of Ukraine is the swiftest this century, the United Nations said Thursday, as Moscow said it was ready for more talks to end fighting even as its forces pressed their assaults on the country’s second-largest city and two strategic seaports.
Ukraine’s leader decried Russia’s escalation of attacks on crowded cities as a blatant terror campaign, while U.S. President Joe Biden warned that if the Russian leader didn’t “pay a price” for the invasion, the aggression wouldn’t stop with one country.
For two decades, Vladimir Putin has struck rivals as reckless, impulsive. But his behavior in ordering an invasion of Ukraine — and now putting Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert — has some in the West questioning whether the Russian president has become dangerously unstable.
Russian shelling pounded the central square in Ukraine’s second-largest city and other civilian targets Tuesday and a 40-mile convoy of tanks and other vehicles threatened the capital — as Ukraine’s embattled president accused Moscow of resorting to terror tactics to press Europe’s largest ground war in generations.
As Russian troops were closing in on the Ukrainian capital, more and more Russians spoke out on Saturday, February 26, 2022, against the invasion, even as the government’s official rhetoric grew increasingly harsher.
Russia’s central bank sharply raised its key rate on Monday, February 28, 2022, in a desperate attempt to shore up the plummeting ruble and prevent the run of banks amid crippling Western sanctions over the Russian war in Ukraine.
About 2,500 people in western Germany demonstrated on Saturday, August 7, 2021, for a quick halt to coal mining in the region, where a village could be bulldozed to make way for a mine.
