The shell that reamed the Russian soldiers' vehicle scattered them in all directions. One was face down on the asphalt, arms outstretched. Another was a mass of white and red in barely-there fatigues. Heat had singed the skin of the third, and the fourth had been thrown 130 feet, landing in a field by the road, torso mangled, legs twisted backward.
The firefight between Ukrainian and Russian forces — it had been a three-vehicle group, including an armored personnel carrier and a Ural truck — erupted on E40, an 8000-mile trans-European highway that threads its way from France’s Calais to Kazakhstan, passing through this spot near a roadside hotel. It's a 24-mile straight shot to the capital, Kyiv.
The battle ended Thursday morning. The cleanup began in the afternoon: A soldier directed traffic around bits of flesh, bone and metal; a tank jerkily hauled a burnt-out armored personnel carrier down the highway; men off to the side unloaded a truckload of large caltrops. Nobody touched the corpses.
This is Ukraine now. Eight years of fighting over the country’s breakaway Russian-backed eastern region have morphed into a vicious war for its existence. Kyiv is virtually encircled. Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, suffers a daily pummeling from shells and missiles. Swaths of the nation's south have already fallen into Russian hands, as have parts of the east. A nuclear plant has been attacked; Russian shells rain on civilians, many of whom now sleep by the thousands in basements and subways.
More than 1 million have been turned into refugees. There are fewer safe places. The Ukrainian winter has turned to spring, but snow still falls through columns of smoke and over graves hurriedly dug.
A 500-mile drive through the country to outrun the start of the Russian blitz — from Shchastia in the disputed Donbas region to Kharkiv and back to the capital — underscores not only the challenges facing Moscow’s onslaught but also the cost to Ukrainians grappling with the wounds of what had been for years called a “frozen conflict” before it exploded last month and startled the world.
ROME (AP) — The head of the Polish bishops’ conference has done what Pope Francis has so far avoided doing: He publicly condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and urged the head of the Russian Orthodox Church to use his influence with Vladimir Putin to demand an end to the war and for Russian soldiers to stand down.
“The time will come to settle these crimes, including before the international courts,” Archbishop Stanislaw Gądecki warned in his March 2 letter to Patriarch Kirill. “However, even if someone manages to avoid this human justice, there is a tribunal that cannot be avoided.”
Gądecki’s tone was significant because it contrasted sharply with the comparative neutrality of the Vatican and Francis to date. The Holy See has called for peace, humanitarian corridors, a cease-fire and a return to negotiations, and even offered itself as a mediator. But Francis has yet to publicly condemn Russia by name for its invasion or publicly appeal to Kirill, and the Vatican offered no comment on the Russian strike on Europe’s largest nuclear plant that sparked a fire Friday.
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