Blasts heard in Kyiv as Russian forces close in

President Biden on Friday emphasized NATO’s open-door policy for new members, as Russia warned Finland and Sweden against joining the transatlantic military alliance.

“President Putin has failed in his goal of dividing the West,” Biden said in a statement after Friday’s NATO emergency summit. “NATO is as united and resolute as it’s ever been, and NATO will maintain its Open Door to those European states who share our values and who one day may seek to join our Alliance.”

Earlier in the day, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova threatened “military and political consequences” against Finland and Sweden if they attempted to become NATO members.

“Finland and Sweden should not base their security on damaging the security of other countries and their accession to NATO can have detrimental consequences and face some military and political consequences,” Zakharova said during a news conference.

Membership of NATO confers mutual defense privileges and obligations. The kerfuffle over NATO membership — one that neither Finland nor Sweden were actively seeking — underscores Russia’s fears over the U.S.-led alliance’s presence in its near west. In attempting to justify his assault on Ukraine, Putin has cited Kyiv’s attempt to join NATO, though the alliance has not made any concrete moves to accept Ukraine.

The attack on Ukraine is shifting the debate about joining NATO in Finland and Sweden.

“Finland is not currently facing an immediate military threat, but it is also now clear that the debate on NATO membership in Finland will change,” said Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin, YLE News reported.

Both Finland and Sweden — which attended Friday’s NATO summit — have strongly condemned Russia’s incursion and provided “military, technical and humanitarian assistance” to Ukraine, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“Russia’s acts are also an attack on the European security order,” Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson wrote on Twitter. “It will be met by a united and robust response in solidarity with Ukraine. Russia alone is responsible for human suffering.”

The U.S. government is prepared to help Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky leave Kyiv to avoid being captured or killed by advancing Russian forces, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials. But so far, the president has refused to go.

As the Russian military ratcheted up its attacks on Friday, a defiant Zelensky pledged to remain in charge of his government despite grave personal risk. “According to the information we have, the enemy has marked me as target No. 1, my family as target No. 2,” he told Ukrainians in an early-morning address. “They want to destroy Ukraine politically by destroying the head of state.”

For weeks, Zelensky has heard those warnings from U.S. officials.

KYIV, Ukraine — From what was left of her fourth-floor balcony, an elderly woman tossed piece after piece of debris to the grass below. Out went heaps of glass, insulation and wood. She occasionally paused to survey the damage around her.

She is among the scores of Ukrainian civilians displaced from their homes in Kyiv on Friday after an unidentified projectile struck just outside their apartment block before dawn, severely damaging the building and wounding several residents, including at least one in critical condition. The apparent Russian strike left behind a large crater that now sits just a few yards from a playground, which remained empty Friday except for one young boy digging in the dirt.

Andriy Zablotskiy, 37, was asleep in one room and his wife and 5-year-old son were in another when the blast struck just outside their windows early Friday in Kyiv. They ran to their bathroom, but then, fearing the building might collapse, fled to the street in their pajamas. Despite the scale of the damage in their apartment, which is on the second floor, no one in the family was injured.

Total numbers of civilian casualties in Ukraine remain unclear with no comprehensive figures released by Ukraine’s government. Early Friday, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said at least 137 people — civilians and military personnel — had been killed in the Russian attacks.

But Russia is facing growing accusations that its barrages are hitting civilian areas, and the tally of Ukrainians killed or injured could climb sharply as Russian forces push into Kyiv and other major cities, many now surrounded by Russian forces.

KYIV — More than four dozen explosions thundered in the early morning in Kyiv Saturday, as Russian forces appeared to ramp up their push to take the Ukrainian capital.

Continuous shelling could be heard for about 30 minutes, around the same time the Ukrainian military repelled Russian attacks near a thermal plant in northern Kyiv, the Kyiv Independent reported.

The country’s intelligence service alerted people to seek safety after more than 50 shots were fired in the Shulyavka, a suburb near the city’s center.

The clashes, at about 3 a.m. in Kyiv, came hours after President Volodymyr Zelensky warned the city’s residents of an unprecedented battle over the capital. Air raid sirens sounded off in the city earlier in the night.

John Sung Kim, chief executive of the software outsourcing company JetBridge, has been communicating with his 24 employees in Kyiv, all software developers, through Slack. Half of them are trying to leave Ukraine, but Kim says he is struggling to help them and has been unable to get them train tickets, a rental car or gasoline.

“The other half of my team wants to stay and fight,” said Kim. “I got on an all-hands with them this morning and told them it’s not their responsibility to be soldiers and there’s other ways they can contribute since they’re software engineers, but there’s nothing I can say to dissuade them.”

Kim said JetBridge’s clients are almost exclusively Silicon Valley tech companies that are publicly traded or have raised venture capital financing. “The universal issue other than transportation logistics seems to be grandparents. ‘My babushka’ is the common theme of why they’re torn from actually leaving,” he said.

Kim, whose wife is Ukrainian, said he has friends that have successfully used traditional smuggling routes in forested areas to leave Ukraine, including one at the border with Poland. “I don’t want to say where this is because we may need to use this, but it is a five-kilometer walk from Ukraine over to Poland,” he said.

The fallout from Russia’s invasion has also impacted JetBridge’s employees in Belarus. “The males in Belarus are scared that there’s going to be military conscription, and unlike the Ukrainians, my Belarusian engineers have zero desire to pick up a rifle. Zero,” he said. In anticipation of European Union sanctions on Belarus, Kim said JetBridge has started paying employees in bitcoin.

A Ukrainian hospital in the southeastern city of Melitopol came under fire on Friday, according to a government official and video of an explosion at the facility, as the city faced heavy shelling and increased pressure from Russian forces.

In a footage of the event, first verified by Storyful, shelling is audible in the background before a large boom followed by a bright flash coming from inside the upper floors of the hospital building. More sounds of what appear to be explosions follow, before the camera zooms in to show sparks pinging off the structure with small puffs of smoke following them. It is unclear from the video what exactly hit the hospital or where it came from.

Ukrainian Health Minister Viktor Liashko, in a Facebook post, confirmed the hospital came under fire. He said that no one was hurt. Liashko mentioned several other medical facilities that he said came under Russian attack.

A day earlier, a Russian bomb struck a hospital in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, killing at least four civilians, according to Human Rights Watch, which said it interviewed hospital staff and analyzed photos of weapons remnants. Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, tweeted early Friday morning that Russian forces have a “long history of attacking civilian infrastructure such as hospitals, markets and schools.”

KYIV, Ukraine — With Russian forces pressing into the northern suburbs of this besieged capital this week, Alexei Ianikovskyi took his family into the city’s center. They found sanctuary at a hotel where he worked, one with a basement for a bomb shelter.

By Friday, Ianikovskyi was faced with a difficult choice — one shared by countless Ukrainians: “I really want to join the army,” he said inside the bunker, as explosions rocked the outskirts of the city. “But I also need to protect my family.”

On the second day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Kyiv was on edge. A suspected rocket destroyed an apartment building in the city and its outer neighborhoods were either battlegrounds or no-go zones. Russian forces tried to push closer to the seat of the government, but Ukrainian forces repelled the advance. Still, by nightfall, the Russian bombardment, and the war itself, seemed to be intensifying.

Russian troops have moved into Ukraine from the north, south and east of the country. Russian forces entered Ukraine through a ground incursion from Belarus toward Kyiv. According to the Pentagon, Russia is facing more resistance in the capital than what it was expecting.

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