Ukrainian president outraged at Kharkiv bombing as talks begin and Russian convoy nears Kyiv

First the Russian vodka came off the shelves in Montgomery County. Then Maryland’s three-decade relationship with the Leningrad region dissolved with a curt letter.

Next might be the state’s approximately $100 million worth of investments linked to Russian companies as Maryland leaders outraged with the invasion of Ukraine seek to wield whatever authority they hold to make a statement and inflict economic pain — however small.

“We are not doing anything to support Russia in any way — or their economy,” Gov. Larry Hogan (R) told reporters Monday, hours after he terminated the state’s sister-city relationship with the Leningrad region as a “symbolic” gesture.

Shelling continued in Kharkiv and Cherniviv as Russia continued its country-wide assault on Ukraine for the fifth day. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke twice and called the Russian attacks “a war crime.”

KYIV, Ukraine — Along a highway flowing north from the capital, lined by businesses and tall apartment buildings, the Ukrainian fighters were taking no chances. The Russians were less than an hour’s drive up the road.

By Monday evening, the Ukrainians — a mix of soldiers and volunteers — had dug deep trenches and erected barricades of giant truck tires topped with sand. At one wide intersection they positioned multiple machine guns, including a Soviet-era heavy gun, shoulder-held antitank rockets and an antiaircraft gun with its barrels pointed at the sky.

An armored personnel carrier with a cannon was covered by a green camouflage tarpaulin. And outside one building, people were making molotov cocktails by the scores. “We are going to give the Russians lots of presents,” promised Yuriy Syrotyuk, 45, a local journalist turned fighter, an AK-47 rifle slung over his shoulder.

As Ukrainian and Russian envoys held peace talks at the Belarusian border Monday, Ukrainian forces here, driven by deep mistrust of the Russians and a desire to protect their homeland, were preparing for the worst-case scenario. That scenario was Russian tanks and soldiers pressing into Kyiv and seizing the seat of government.

This highway stretching through the city’s northern Obolon district is one of the main routes by which the Russians could attack.

A visit Monday to this fortified patch, an area the Ukrainian fighters described as “their second line,” opened a window into the efforts by ordinary Ukrainians to stand up to the Russian invasion. But it also portended a violent urban conflict, with the prospect of thousands of civilians trapped in the crossfire.

A massive convoy of Russian ground forces is wending its way closer to Kyiv, drawing within 20 miles of the center of the Ukrainian capital on Monday, a new batch of satellite images showed.

The line of Russian military vehicles stretched along the road for roughly 40 miles, far longer than initial estimates, reported the U.S. firm Maxar Technologies, which captured the photos Monday morning local time. The convoy includes armored vehicles, tanks and towed artillery, Maxar said, and it appears to be making steady progress along the war-scarred roads leading to Kyiv.

On Sunday, Maxar released images that showed the same group of Russian forces roughly 40 miles from the capital. The company’s analysts estimated then that the convoy was about three miles long, but revised their assessment dramatically upward one day later, noting that cloud cover interfered with initial projections.

The convoy cuts a menacing figure through the countryside near Kyiv, but Ukrainian troops remained defiant on Monday after weathering the most intense shelling since the invasion began, in the eastern city of Kharkiv.

At some points in the convoy, vehicles appear to be spaced many yards apart; elsewhere, they’re traveling two or three abreast. In some images, burning buildings can be seen near the road outside of Ivankiv, a settlement northwest of Kyiv.

Additional images, taken from the sky above southern Belarus, show more ground force deployments and attack helicopter units, Maxar reported. All were spotted less than 20 miles from Belarus’s border with Ukraine.

Russian forces bombarded the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv on Monday in some of the heaviest shelling since the invasion began. At least 11 people were killed and more were injured, Ukrainian officials said. Suspected cluster munitions struck buildings in residential parts of the city.

Kharkiv resident Alexey Zavrazhnyi, 32, said a rocket fell on the opposite side of a playground near his apartment, damaging the area where Zavrazhnyi said he takes his 9-month-old daughter to play. Another rocket part was embedded in the concrete outside a storefront, about 150 feet from the playground.

Video posted on Telegram shows the instant the rocket flew into a crowd outside the storefront, and an object hurtling away in the direction of the playground moments later.

While Zavrazhnyi said there were two rockets, experts The Post spoke to said each looked like a different part of the same munition type. Michael Sheldon, a research associate at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, said it appeared to be a 300mm Smerch rocket. Mark Hiznay, associate director of the arms division of Human Rights Watch, noted that the rocket part embedded in the concrete appeared to be the Smerch’s expended rocket motor, and the part near the playground looked like the tail section.

Miriam Berger, Dalton Bennett, Sarah Cahlan and Joyce Sohyun Lee contributed to this report.

The Ukrainian military on Monday released video reportedly showing a drone striking on a Russian surface-to-air missile system in Ukraine. The Washington Post verified the video’s location but was not able to independently confirm the date of the drone strike.

The unit’s heads-up display indicates it is a Turkish TB2, according to Wim Zwijnenburg, a project leader for humanitarian disarmament at the Netherlands-based organization Pax, which focuses on protecting civilians from acts of war.

The 86-second video, which appeared to be clips cut from longer footage, shows an initial strike on Russian forces in the Polis’kyi district, about 65 miles northwest of Kyiv, the capital.

The drone then pulls back and watches a massive explosion near where the missile struck, sending sparks into the air and building smoke that obscures the drone’s view.

Rob Lee, a former Marine infantry officer who is now a senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, identified on Twitter the destroyed weapons as a Russian Buk-M1. Several other weapons experts corroborated his identification.

Ukraine first bought Bayraktar TB2 drones from NATO member Turkey in 2019. The drones, which have featured prominently in conflicts in Libya, Syria and recently in Ethiopia, were used in Ukrainian strikes against Russia in October 2021.

The addition of Turkish drones to Ukraine’s arsenal has been a major source of tension for Russia. In a December phone conversation with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Russian President Vladimir Putin called the Ukrainians’ use of Turkish-made drones “destructive behavior,” according to a Kremlin readout on the call.

Devastated by footage showing a Russian missile striking an apartment building in Kyiv, a Ukrainian mechanic tried to sink the superyacht he worked on, saying its owner might have supplied weapons used in the invasion.

Taras Ostapchuk had worked on the $7 million Lady Anastasia for about a decade, reported Ultima Hora, a newspaper in Spain’s Balearic Islands. The 156-foot luxury yacht was docked at Port Adriano on the Spanish island of Mallorca.

After watching the footage on his cellphone during a break Saturday, Ostapchuk grew angry because he thought the weapons might have been supplied by his boss, whom he identified as the head of a Russian state-owned military-products supplier. The Washington Post was unsuccessful in confirming the ownership of the yacht Monday.

Ostapchuk decided to sink the yacht, he said in a statement to law enforcement and in media interviews.

“I told myself: ‘What do I need a job for if I don’t have a country?’” Ostapchuk told Ultima Hora.

The Lady Anastasia partially sank. Ostapchuk was arrested and appeared Sunday in court, where he recounted his actions before a judge. He was unapologetic.

“I don’t regret anything I’ve done, and I would do it again,” he said, according to Ultima Hora. He added that Russian forces “were attacking innocents.”

Neus Canyelles Nicolau, Ostapchuk’s attorney, confirmed details of the account in a Monday interview with The Post. An investigation is underway, and Ostapchuk faces charges for allegedly damaging private property, she said.

The Russian military is reorganizing after the first few days of mostly unsuccessful operations, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based group that researches military tactics “to achieve U.S. strategic objectives.”

Troops around Kyiv are waiting for reinforcements, and artillery is causing severe damage to civilians and infrastructure in Kharkiv. While advances in the south seem to have slowed down in recent hours, Russian forces have launched a new assault on Mariupol from the east.