Russian troops are murdering officials in cities throughout Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky said today.
Speaking from Kyiv, the Ukrainian leader accused Moscow’s forces of kidnapping Mayors and then leaving them dead or missing.
He said: “They are kidnapping the mayors of our cities. They killed some of them. We can’t find some of them.
“We have already found some of them and they are dead.”
Zelensky’s shocking claim comes amid fears Russian troops are compensating for their disastrous invasion by resorting to deliberately targeting civilians and executing officials.
Ahead of peace talks the Ukrainian leader said his country could declare neutrality and offer security guarantees to Russia to secure peace “without delay”.
Whilst claiming only a face-to-face meeting with Putin would end war Zelensky added: “Security guarantees and neutrality, non-nuclear status of our state – we are ready to go for it.”
Talking before the latest round of peace talks, which are to be held in Turkey tomorrow, Zelensky stressed Ukraine ’s priority is ensuring its sovereignty and its “territorial integrity.”
He said: “We must come to an agreement with the president of the Russian Federation, and in order to reach an agreement, he needs to get out of there on his own feet – and come to meet me.”
Today it emerged 17,000 Russian troops have been killed in the invasion and 586 tanks blown up in ferocious fighting.
Moscow has also lost 123 warplanes and 127 helicopters to Ukraine’s ground defence systems.
The mayor of Irpin, near Kyiv, said Ukrainian forces had seized back full control of the town which has been one of the main hotspots of bitter fighting with Russian troops near the capital.
Mayor Oleksandr Markushyn said: “We have good news today – Irpin has been liberated.
“We understand that there will be more attacks on our town and we will defend it courageously.”
Ukrainian forces are on the offensive, pushing Russian troops back in areas around Kyiv, the northeast and the southwest.
Russia has meanwhile kept up pressure in the southeast near separatist areas, including its devastating siege of Mariupol, razed while tens of thousands of civilians remain trapped inside.
Mayor Vadym Boichenko, who has escaped the city and was speaking from an undisclosed location, said 26 buses were waiting to evacuate some of the 160,000 trapped civilians but Russia was denying safe passage.
He said: “The situation in the city remains difficult. People are beyond the line of humanitarian catastrophe.
“We need to completely evacuate Mariupol.”
Ukrainian children have suffered enormously with 143 killed so far and 216 injured – even though many more deaths among the young are suspected.
Hundreds of children have been rescued by a heroic underground movement dedicated to snatching them from beneath Putin’s tanks as they hide in basements.
Today it emerged 30 had been plucked to safety and smuggled all the way to Ivano Frankivsk in the Carpathian foothills, where they will be safer.
Aid agencies say ten million Ukrainians have been displaced in just over a month since the invasion started.
And Ukraine has lost $432 billion from the Russian invasion, according to Kyiv Economy Minister Yulia Svyridenko.
She said: “This is the sum of the only one-time losses that Ukraine has suffered since the Russian invasion.”
She added that the biggest damage is the loss of infrastructure – 5,000 miles of roads, dozens of railway stations and airports worth £90 billion were destroyed and damaged.
With Russia’s offensive stalled its troops have resorted to pummelling Ukrainian towns and cities with rockets and artillery in a grinding war of attrition.
Fierce fighting has raged on the outskirts of Kyiv, but Russian troops remain miles from the city centre, their aim of quickly encircling the capital faltering In Stoyanka village near Kyiv, Ukrainian soldier Serhiy Udod said Russian troops had taken up defensive positions and suffered heavy losses.
He said “probably they thought it would be like Crimea”, which Russia annexed quickly and almost without a shot fired in 2014.
He added: “But, here it’s not like in Crimea. We are not happy to see them. Here they suffer and get killed.”
A fiercer than expected Ukrainian resistance, bolstered by weapons from the UK and other Western allies, has bogged Russian forces down.
Meanwhile, Ukraine has banned reporting on troop and equipment movements not announced or approved by the military.
Journalists breaking the law, even if they are foreign, could face three to eight years in prison.
Today it emerged that orders to blitz the stricken city of Kharkiv were given by a Russian general born in that city.
The unnamed general’s details are kept by Ukraine’s Office of the Prosecutor General which has a list of 200 “war criminals”.
Prosecutor General Irina Venediktova said his identity was tracked down after her office fingered a Russian serviceman who took part in the bombing.
She added: “Thanks to him we went to another suspected Russian Federation general, who gave the orders to bomb Kharkiv.
“The most cynical thing is that this general was born in the Kharkiv region.”