He said the fighters needed more weapons, but "we'll kill the enemy and take their weapons." "In my old age I had to take up arms," said Andrey Goncharuk, 68. On the far edges of Kyiv, volunteer fighters well into their 60s manned a checkpoint to try to block the Russian advance. 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. defense official said the immense column of hundreds of tanks and other vehicles appeared to be stalled roughly 25 kilometers (16 miles) from Kyiv and had made no real progress in the last couple of days. "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. Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko said the attacks there had been relentless. "We don't have any Ukrainian forces in the city, only civilians and people here who want to LIVE."
"I simply asked them not to shoot at people," he said in a statement. He said he asked them not to shoot civilians and to allow crews to gather up the bodies from the streets. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's office told The Associated Press that it could not comment on the situation in Kherson while the fighting was still going on.īut the mayor of Kherson, Igor Kolykhaev, said Russian soldiers were in the city and came to the city administration building.