March 18, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news

The Armed Forces of Ukraine have issued an upbeat assessment of their defense of Kyiv, saying Russia’s two main routes for attacking the capital city have been blocked. 

In the face of a campaign to apparently encircle the capital ahead of a possible attempt to take it, Russian forces on both sides of the Dnipro river — which divides the city north to south — have been stopped, according to Oleksandr Hruzevych, deputy chief of staff.

Russian forces had abandoned offensive actions around Brovary to the northeast of Kyiv, and Boryspil to the southeast, Hruzevych said. After creating two lines of defense to protect the capital, Hruzevych said Ukraine’s army was now “working on strengthening a third, distant line of defense.” 

Addressing the threat posed by cruise missiles, the brigadier general said an air defense system was still in operation around Kyiv, but admitted missiles intercepted over the city still posed a threat. One person was killed in such an incident Friday morning in the northwestern district of Podilskyi, the city council said earlier. 

On Friday morning, four cruise missiles fired from warplanes over the Black Sea had smashed into an aircraft parts plant in the western city of Lviv. Two further missiles had been intercepted by air defense systems before they could hit their target.  

"The Black Sea and Belarus are two difficult directions from which the enemy launches missile strikes,” Hruzevych acknowledged. But, he continued: “An effective system has been developed where the missiles are to be destroyed on approach. We are now working on a system that will minimize the impact of missiles for civilians." 

He also said a campaign to remove the threat of saboteurs in the capital had already resulted in the elimination of more than 100 people. 

US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin met with US and NATO troops in Bulgaria on Friday, where he told the troops that they are creating “trust” by training alongside one another.

“You can’t surge trust at the eleventh hour; trust is something you have to work on every day. And from what I’ve heard, it’s exactly what you’re doing. You’re building trust with, amongst, with our allies, and you’re learning more about each other, and I think that’s just fantastic,” Austin said.

The US troops that are in Bulgaria are part of the US troop deployment to reinforce the United States' commitment to the NATO alliance and to reinforce the Eastern flank. 

Reporters traveling with Austin conducted a brief interview with an Army major who is on deployment in Bulgaria from his home base in Rosenberg, Germany. 

The focus of the US troop deployment there is to partner with Bulgarian land forces, Mannina said. The US troops are there to be a part of “NATO’s effort to stand up a multinational battle group here in Bulgaria,” he added.

Mannina said the soldiers there are “anxious” but “understand the strategic relevance of our mission.”

“We're very, we're very aware and attuned to the fact that there's a war going on only a few hundred miles from us and, and we, but I think the soldiers are also excited to be a part of something really important here and to understand the strategic relevance of our mission and assuring our allies and building combat credible forces on behalf of NATO,” Mannina said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Friday that 130 people have been rescued from the bombed theater in the city of Mariupol so far.

Hundreds of people were taking shelter at the theater when it was bombed on Wednesday.

Speaking on Ukrainian TV, Zelensky said that rescue operations are continuing at the site despite the difficulties.

However, hundreds of people are still under the rubble in Mariupol, Zelensky added.

Earlier on Friday, officials from the Donetsk region and Kyiv said they had no further update on how many people had survived the attack. On Thursday, Ukraine’s human rights commissioner Liudmyla Denisova said there was no update on figures released, which reported 130 people rescued from a total of 1,300 people believed to have been sheltering in the building.

Zelensky also warned that it will be Western leaders’ moral defeat if Ukraine does not receive advanced weapons.

“We still have no missile defense. We do not have enough fighter planes,” Zelensky said.

“Russian missiles are not going to be defeated by certain hunting guns that they are trying to sell us sometimes,” he said.

On Ukraine’s bid to become a member of the European Union, Zelensky said, “We will become a full member of the EU and every civil servant is working towards this 24/7.”

United States Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield slammed Russia's attempts to lie about allegations of biological weapons in Ukraine once again Friday morning. 

"As I said one week ago, Ukraine does not have a biological weapons program. There are no Ukrainian biological weapons laboratories – not near Russia’s border, not anywhere. There are only public health facilities, proudly, and I say proudly, supported and recognized by the US government, the World Health Organization, and other governments and international institutions," Thomas-Greenfield said in prepared remarks to the UN Security Council. 

Ukrainian and US officials have repeatedly debunked claims of US-supported biological programs in Ukraine. 

Friday's emergency session was called by Russia after they announced Thursday that they would not call for a vote on their humanitarian draft resolution on Ukraine. 

Thomas-Greenfield instead said "it is Russia that has a well-documented history of using chemical weapons" and that Friday's meeting is 'the result of their isolation on this Council and on the world stage." 

Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia claimed Friday that new details show evidence of US-supported biological weapons in Ukraine. 

"Over the last week, new details have come to light which allows to state that the components for biological weapons were being created on the territory of Ukraine," Nebenzia said in translated remarks to the council. "We can see that the American colleagues were not helping, as they claim, the Ukrainian Ministry of Health, but rather the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense."

Nebenzia claimed that a new document distributed to the council Friday morning "confirms direct funding and supervision of the Pentagon and its defense threat reduction agency of military and biological projects in Ukraine." 

"The representative of the US State Department continue to muddle the information and ascertain that US allegedly does not operate in any biological laboratories in the territory of Ukraine, but the facts show otherwise," the Russian ambassador claimed. 

More context: There are US-funded biolabs in Ukraine, but they are not building bioweapons. Actually, it's the opposite: Part of the reason for their creation was to secure old Soviet weapons left behind in the former Soviet republics. The State Department has described the claims as nonsense — and the US and Ukrainian governments have repeatedly, and for years now, tried to bat down conspiracy theories about the labs and spoken about the work that is actually being done in them.

Russia's falsehoods about labs like this have not been limited to Ukraine, and the country has been pushing various bits of disinformation about the US and biological weapons since the Cold War.

CNN's Kiely Westhoff and Donie O'Sullivan contributed reporting to this post.

Poland plans to submit a proposal at a NATO summit in Brussels next week for a peacekeeping mission in Ukraine, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said on Friday. 

Speaking at a news conference in Warsaw, Morawiecki told reporters that “at the next NATO summit, the proposal for a peace mission in Ukraine will be formally submitted.” 

Morawiecki was asked whether he thinks there was consensus for such a mission in Ukraine among NATO members. 

“Poland is very active in this forum, both in NATO and in the EU and we are the ones who urge them to take the following steps,” he said.  

On Friday, Russia launched missile strikes near an airport in Lviv, a strategic Ukrainian city not far from the Polish border.

Russian soldiers do not seem “to be particularly motivated,” Gen. Frank McKenzie, the Commander of US Central Command, told reporters during a briefing at the Pentagon Friday.

“They don’t appear, from where I sit at least, to be particularly motivated or particularly engaged in the campaign they’re undertaking,” McKenzie said of Russian forces fighting in Ukraine.

US Central Command oversees the US military presence in the Middle East. McKenzie is set to retire in the coming weeks.

Casualties in Russia's invasion of Ukraine are mounting. In central Lviv, local activists and authorities placed 109 empty strollers to symbolize the children who have been killed during the invasion.

According to the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine, 109 children had been killed. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights noted the office's report on Friday.

Intense fighting and shelling continued across different parts of Ukraine on Friday. Here's what you should know:

Impacted areas: Multiple explosions were heard at about 6:30 a.m. local time and smoke was seen rising in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, according to a CNN team on the ground. Mayor Andriy Sadovyi said the Russian missiles struck an aircraft repair plant, which is close to Lviv airport. Russia launched six missiles toward the city, but two of them were intercepted by air defense systems, according to the Ukrainian armed forces.

One person died and four others were injured as a fire broke out after the remains of a downed rocket hit the five-story residential building in the Podilskyi district of Kyiv on Friday, Ukraine's Emergency Service said.

At least two people have died and six were wounded after a missile strike in the city of Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine, according to Pavlo Kyrylenko, the head of the Donetsk regional administration.

Russian losses: At least five Russian servicemen, including the commander of the Kostroma airborne forces, died in battle in Ukraine, Russian regional state TV network GTRK Kostroma reported Thursday.

Evacuations: Nine corridors to evacuate civilians from towns and cities badly hit by Russian attacks have been agreed for Friday, according to the Ukrainian government. For the second day running, one of the agreed corridors links the besieged southeastern city of Mariupol to Zaporizhzhia, which remains under Ukrainian control.

Biden-Xi call: A call between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden was underway Friday. Since the war began, China has tried to project a neutral stance. It has not condemned Russian actions, and has refused to label the attack an invasion. Chinese diplomats have criticized NATO expansion and accused the United States of fueling the conflict. But they have also called for a diplomatic solution.

Though not military allies, China and Russia have in recent years burnished their partnership in trade, technology and coordination of military exercises, while becoming increasingly vocal about what they view as Western interference into their domestic affairs — pushing back on US-led sanctions and often voting as a bloc in the United Nations.

Russia has asked China for military and economic support and Beijing has expressed some openness to this request, according to US intelligence and diplomacy officials. It is not yet clear whether China intends to provide Russia with that help, US officials familiar with the intelligence tell CNN — but according to the White House, Biden will lay out the potential ramifications of such an action during the call with Xi.

At least 816 people have been killed and 1,333 have been injured since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, the United Nations Human Rights Office said Friday. 

Most of the casualties were due to “the use of explosive weapons with a wide impact area, including shelling from heavy artillery and multiple-launch rocket systems and missile air strikes," the OHCR said in a report.

Those killed include 152 men, 116 women, seven girls, and 16 boys, as well as 36 children, and 489 adults whose sex is yet unknown, the UN agency said.

The OHCR said, it “believes that the actual figures are considerably higher, especially in Government-controlled territory and especially in recent days, as the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration.”