Ukrainian military and civil defenses continued to battle Russian troops hammering cities all over the country as international concerns mounted and Kyiv accused Russia of worsening disregard for civilians and the rules of warfare on the ninth day of Russia’s unprovoked invasion.
Much of the international attention focused on an overnight fire and Russian seizure of a nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhya in northeast Ukraine, which was said to have avoided radiation leaks and was operating at around 60-percent capacity on March 4.
But shelling also rang out in the capital, Kyiv, during the day, too, although they were said to be far from the city center.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on March 4 accused Russian soldiers of targeting civilians with bombs and committing rape in Ukrainian cities, without giving evidence for the claim.
RFE/RL and international agencies were unable to independently verify Kuleba’s accusation of rape.
“When bombs fall on your cities, when soldiers rape women in the occupied cities — and we have numerous cases of, unfortunately, when Russian soldiers rape women in Ukrainian cities — it’s difficult, of course, to speak about the efficiency of international law,” Kuleba, speaking in English, told an event at Chatham House in London.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said after a meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels that the alliance has seen the use of cluster bombs in Ukraine.
In Kherson, where Russian troops had reached the city center and were said to be seeking to establish local control on March 3, the regional administration said Russian actions had shut down several mobile telephone networks.
The port city of Mariupol remained “under siege” with Ukrainian forces battling to avoid allowing Russian forces to surround the city, Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovich said.
The cities of Kharkiv and Okhtyrka were under fire but defenses were holding, he said.
Arestovich credited defense of those cities with “gaining time” and diverting Russian forces from other goals, including Kyiv.
The head of the region, Dmytro Zhyvytskiy, warned that water and electricity had been lost since an air strike destroyed Okhtyrka’s power plant.
He also said Russian troops were capturing ground in Energodar near the Zaporizhzhya nuclear plant in southeastern Ukraine.
The regional branch of Ukraine’s state administration on March 4 raised the death toll to at least 47 following a Russian air strike in the city of Chernihiv, a city of around 300,000 near the northeastern border with Russia.
Images circulated of heavily destroyed residential buildings and a burning oil depot in Chernihiv.
Protests against Russian occupation meanwhile continued early on March 4 in the Zaporizhzhya region, a RFE/RL Ukrainian Service correspondent said, including in Primorsk and Melitopol, where a local organizer said thousands turned up at a central square.
WATCH: Fires could still be seen smoldering in what used to be a row of high-rise apartment buildings in Borodyanka on March 3. The small town northwest of Kyiv came under Russian air strikes and artillery shelling the previous day.
Regional authorities said the Russian military had surrounded a local TV tower in Melitopol and began broadcasting Russian programs.
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a speech in which he claimed to have no “bad intentions” toward Russia’s neighbors.
“I would like to stress once again: We do not have any, as we have said earlier, bad intentions toward our neighbors,” Putin said. “I would advise them not to intensify tension as well, not to introduce any restrictions. We are fulfilling all our commitments and will follow to stick to them further.”
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Putin declared his unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, saying Moscow’s aim was the “demilitarization” of Ukraine and accusing Kyiv of extremism with labels that he has routinely used in the eight years since he occupied Ukraine’s Crimea and began support for armed separatists in eastern Ukraine.
As international financial and other sanctions increased and the United Nation’s top human rights body voted 32-2 on a resolution to form a panel to monitor human rights in Ukraine, Putin placed the blame for Russian’s isolation on other countries.
“If some [countries] do not want to cooperate with us on the international level, they will inflict damages both to themselves and to us, but we will solve all the issues ourselves,” Putin said.
He called on other countries to “normalize relations” with Russia, whose invasion was overwhelmingly condemned this week by the UN membership.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov urged Russians, thousands of whom have been detained for anti-war protests as media and other measures are tightened against dissent, to “rally around” Putin.
NATO foreign ministers, meanwhile, were meeting to weigh responses to protect its members and help Ukraine.
Stoltenberg called on Putin to engage in diplomacy to end the fighting.
Thousands of people are thought to have been killed and more than 1 million Ukrainians have fled west amid a burgeoning refugee crisis since Putin launched his invasion.
Ukraine’s commissioner for children’s rights, Darya Herasymchuk, said on March 4 that at least 28 children had been killed and 64 injured so far in the conflict.
She said around 1.5 million children reside in the most affected areas and cited “destroyed maternity hospitals, kindergartens, and schools.”
