Ukrainian Health Minister Oleh Lyashko reported that 137 Ukrainians were killed and more than 200 wounded on Thursday in the first day of Russian military attack on Ukraine.
Lyashko also said that the Ukrainian authorities are readapting the country’s public health facilities to accommodate those who need medical assistance due to the hostilities.
Meanwhile, the spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Shabia Mantoo, estimated that 100,000 people have fled their homes in the country and that thousands have left Ukraine to seek refuge abroad.
“We think that close to 100,000 people have already fled their homes and may have moved within the country and that several thousand have crossed international borders,” Mantoo said.
On the other hand, the Ukrainian deputy defense minister reported that heavy Russian shelling continued in the eastern Donetsk region.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that the only option he had for his country’s security was to attack Ukraine, after launching an offensive against the neighboring country.
“What is currently happening is a forced measure, since they did not leave us any other way to proceed,” Putin told a meeting with businessmen broadcast on television.
“The risks in the security aspect were so great that it was impossible to react in any other way,” he asserted.
Aleksandr Shokhin, president of the Russian Industrial Union, said in the meeting with Putin that the country should remain linked to global trade despite Western sanctions.
“Every effort should be made to demonstrate as much as possible that Russia remains part of the global economy and will not cause, even through some kind of countermeasures, global negative phenomena on world markets,” Shokhin said. .
For his part, Putin assured that they were preparing for the sanctions with which the West has threatened.
“Russia remains a part of the world economy and, in this sense, since it remains a part, we are not going to harm the system in which we feel integrated.
“Our partners must understand this and not aim to get us out of this system,” Putin added, before US President Joe Biden stated that there will be more economic sanctions on the Russians for the attack on Ukraine.
Ukrainian authorities reported fighting in the Sumy, Kharkiv, Kherson, Odessa, Chernobyl regions and at a military airport near Kiev, after Russia began its attack.
At the close of Thursday, the Russian Army said that its soldiers successfully achieved all their objectives on the first day of attacking Ukraine.
“All operations assigned to groups of troops of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation for the day were successfully completed,” Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said.
The Ministry officially confirmed that its forces have penetrated into Ukraine. The Army added that it had destroyed 83 Ukrainian military installations, including 11 airfields.