The threat of intensified attacks in Kyiv came after Russian authorities accused Ukraine of injuring seven people and damaging about 100 residential buildings with airstrikes in Bryansk, an area bordering Ukraine. Authorities in another Russian border area also reported Ukrainian bombing on Thursday. Kyiv gradually showed some signs of pre-war life as Russian troops failed to occupy the city and retreated to focus on a concentrated offensive in eastern Ukraine, leaving evidence of possible war crimes in their wake. A new bombing could return the capital’s residents to shelters at metro stations and the constant mourning of air raid sirens. Ukrainian officials have not confirmed targets in Russia, and reports from Russian authorities could not be independently verified. However, Ukrainian officials claimed that their forces had hit a key Russian warship with missiles on Thursday. If true, the claim would represent a significant victory. The Moskva guided missile cruiser, named for the Russian capital, sank while being towed to the port on Thursday after suffering severe damage under conditions that remained in dispute. Moscow has recognized a fire on the ship but no attack. US and other Western officials could not confirm what caused the blaze. Moskva had the capability to carry 16 long-range cruise missiles, and its removal reduces Russia’s firepower in the Black Sea. If Ukrainian forces had evacuated the ship, the Moskva probably represents the largest warship to have sunk in battle since the Falklands War. A British submarine torpedoed an Argentine Navy cruiser called the ARA General Belgrano during the 1982 conflict, killing more than 300 sailors aboard the ship. The loss of the Russian warship in an invasion already widely regarded as a historic blunder was also a symbolic defeat for Moscow as its troops regrouped for an attack on eastern Ukraine after retreating from the Kiev region and much of the north. In his speech Thursday night, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the people of his country should be proud to have survived 50 days of attack when the Russian invaders “gave us a maximum of five.” Zelensky did not name Moscow by name, but described the ways in which Ukraine had defended itself from the attack, saying “those who have shown that Russian warships can be removed, even if they are at the bottom” of the sea. It was his only reference to Moscow. News of the flagship overshadowed Russian claims of progress in the southern port city of Mariupol, where Moscow forces have been fighting Ukrainians since the early days of the invasion in some of the fiercest fighting – at horrific cost to civilians. The small number of Ukrainian defenders in Mariupol is resisting a siege that has trapped more than 100,000 people in desperate need for food, water and heating. David Beasley, executive director of the United Nations World Food Program, told the Associated Press in an interview Thursday that people are “starving” to death in the besieged city. The mayor of Mariupol said this week that more than 10,000 civilians had been killed and that the death toll could rise to more than 20,000. Other Ukrainian officials said they expected to find evidence of atrocities committed against civilians, such as those discovered in Bukha and other cities outside Kyiv when the Russians withdrew. Mariupol City Council said Friday that locals said they saw Russian troops digging up corpses buried in backyards and not allowing new burials of “people killed by them.” “Why the exhumation is taking place and where the bodies will be transported is unknown,” the council said in a statement posted on the Telegram messaging app. The capture of Mariupol is crucial for Russia because it will allow its forces in the south, which came through the annexed Crimean peninsula, to fully connect with troops in the Donbas region, the eastern industrial heart of Ukraine and the target of the impending attack. Moscow-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian forces in Donbas since 2014, the same year Russia occupied Crimea from Ukraine. Russia has recognized the independence of two rebel-held areas of the region. Although it is uncertain when Russia will launch a full-scale campaign, a Ukrainian regional official said on Friday that seven people had been killed and 27 wounded when Russian forces opened fire on buses carrying civilians to the northern village of Borovaya. Kharkiv. Ukrainian law enforcement agencies are working to determine the circumstances of the attack, Dmitry Tsubenko, a spokesman for the regional prosecutor’s office, told Ukraine’s Suspilne news website. Chubenko said Ukrainian authorities had opened criminal proceedings in connection with a suspected “violation of the laws and customs of war, combined with premeditated murder”. Allegations of attack on civilian buses could not be independently verified. The Russian Defense Ministry said on Friday that Russian strikes in the Kharkiv region “cleared a group of mercenaries from a Polish private military company” of up to 30 people and “released” an iron and steel agent in Mariupol from “Ukrainian nationalists”. The claims could not be independently verified. On Thursday, the Ministry of Defense explained that the damage to the Russian flagship in the Black Sea by fire resulted in the explosion of ammunition that was stacked on the ship. In addition to cruise missiles, the warship also had air defense missiles and other artillery. The ministry did not say what could have caused the fire, but said the “main missile weapons” had not been damaged and the crew, which usually numbers about 500 people, had left the boat. It was not clear if there were any casualties. Maxim Martchenko, governor of Ukraine’s Odessa Black Sea region, said Ukrainian forces had hit Moscow with two Neptune missiles and caused “serious damage”. Neptune is an anti-ship missile recently developed by Ukraine based on an older Soviet design. The rocket launchers are mounted on trucks near the coast and, according to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, can hit targets up to 280 kilometers (175 miles) away. This would have put Moskva in range, based on where the ship was when the fire started. Launched as Slava in 1979, the cruiser saw service in the Cold War and during the conflicts in Georgia and Syria and assisted in conducting scientific research in peacetime with the United States. During the Cold War, it carried nuclear weapons. British defense officials say the loss of Moskva is likely to force Moscow to change the way its naval forces operate in the Black Sea. In a post on social media on Friday, the UK Department of Defense said the ship, which returned to operational service last year after a major overhaul, “played a key role both as a command boat and as a defense hub”. Other Russian ships in the northern Black Sea moved further south after the Moscow incident, said a senior U.S. defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wanted to discuss internal military considerations. Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24 and suffered thousands of military casualties. The conflict has killed countless Ukrainian civilians and forced millions more to flee. It has also pushed up prices in grocery stores and petrol pumps, while dragging the global economy. The head of the International Monetary Fund said on Thursday that the war had helped the agency downgrade economic forecasts for 143 countries.
Associated Press reporters around the world contributed to this report. Follow the AP coverage for the war at
