Huge Russian convoy advances on Kyiv; missiles batter Ukraine, nearly 700,000 flee
KYIV, Ukraine — Russian forces struck government buildings, a television tower and Ukraine’s main Holocaust memorial on Tuesday as they ramped up their assault on urban centers and assembled a 40-mile-long column of tanks, artillery and other military vehicles outside Kyiv in what appeared to foreshadow an imminent assault on the capital.
The specter of more violence and the scenes of civilians huddled in bomb shelters or pouring across Ukraine’s western borders came as Russia found itself increasingly isolated on the world stage, with few allies beyond China and North Korea and sanctions inflicting immediate damage to its economy and currency.
President Joe Biden announced during his State of the Union address Tuesday night a ban on Russian aircraft in American airspace, the latest in a barrage of punitive measures that Biden said have made Putin “more isolated from the world than he’s ever been.”
Framing the Ukrainian war as part of a global “battle between autocracies and democracies,” Biden said Russia had “badly miscalculated.”
“When the history of this era is written, Putin’s war on Ukraine will have left Russia weaker and the rest of the world stronger,” he said.
The United Nations high commissioner for refugees, Filippo Grandi, said in a news briefing from Geneva
