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What we know — day 25: Sunday March 20
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Recent air strikes have hit the Antonov aircraft works and Artem arms factory near Kyiv and an aircraft repair plant near Lviv, indicating that Russia intends to cripple Ukraine’s munitions manufacturing capacity.
Russian and Ukrainian military claims cannot be independently verified.
Other key maps from the war
The number of Ukrainians fleeing the fighting reached 3.1mn by March 16, the UN’s refugee agency reported, highlighting the growing refugee crisis.
The country taking the highest number of refugees is Poland, with 1.9mn alone.
On Tuesday March 15, Ukrainian emergency services said Russian artillery hit a 16-storey apartment building in the Svyatoshinsky neighbourhood of Kyiv, close to the suburb of Irpin that has seen some of the heaviest fighting of the war. Firefighters tackling a blaze caused by the shelling rescued 35 people but found two dead at the scene.
Civilian casualties included 549 deaths and 957 injuries by March 11, the UN has said, amid concerns over Russia’s indiscriminate targeting of civilian infrastructure and facilities as well as the use of siege warfare.
Joanne Mariner, director of crisis response at Amnesty International, told the Financial Times on Sunday: “Given the patterns we are seeing, we can say with a pretty high degree of certainty that Russian forces have committed war crimes.”
On March 13, 35 people were killed by a Russian air strike on a Ukrainian base just 15km from the Polish border. The attack on the military base, which had been used by US troops to train Ukrainian soldiers, was the latest in Russia’s increasingly direct threats that Nato’s continued support of Ukraine risks making it an enemy combatant in the war. Nato’s military presence has expanded across Europe in recent years, with troops positioned in countries such as Poland, Romania and Lithuania.
On February 28, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan indicated that he would invoke a clause in the 1936 Montreux Convention that allows Ankara to curb the passage of naval vessels belonging to warring parties through the Dardanelles and Bosphorus straits. “We have the authority and we have decided to use it in a way that will prevent the crisis from escalating,” he said.
Russia’s multipronged invasion suggests that the plan is to advance south towards Kyiv from Belarus, encircle Ukraine’s forces in the east and cleave the country from the Russian border to the Black Sea.
On February 22, Russian President Vladimir Putin recognised the separatist governments in Luhansk and Donetsk, two provinces in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine, and ordered Russian troops to enter them. On February 24, Moscow began a full-scale invasion of the country.
Sources: Institute for the Study of War, Rochan Consulting, FT research
Cartography and development by Steve Bernard, Chris Campbell, Caitlin Gilbert, Emma Lewis, Joanna S. Kao, Sam Learner, Ændra Rininsland, Niko Kommenda, Alan Smith and Martin Stabe. Based on reporting by Roman Olearchyk and John Reed in Kyiv, Guy Chazan in Lviv, Henry Foy in Brussels
Source: Financial Times
