US Defense official says there is a decline in the morale of Russian troops

The United States has information about the decline in morale of Russian troops in some units in Ukraine as the war enters its fourth week, a senior US defense official said on Thursday, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“We have certainly collected anecdotal indications that morale is not high in some units,” the official told reporters, without citing evidence. Reuters could not independently confirm these facts

“We believe that part of that is due to poor leadership, the lack of information that the troops get about their mission and objectives, and I think the disappointment that they have been resisted (by the Ukrainians) as fiercely as they have been,” the official said.

The official told reporters that, according to these observations, it appeared that Russian forces “still want to besiege Kiev”.

The Ukrainian leader accused Moscow on Thursday of building a new Cold War wall in Europe “between freedom and slavery,” as his government said Russian bombings had killed 21 more civilians.

Three weeks after their devastating invasion, Russian forces were also accused of bombing a theater that housed many civilians and was marked with the word “children”.

Three weeks after their devastating invasion, new fighting broke out on Thursday outside Kiev, as Russian troops strive to encircle the Ukrainian capital in their slow offensive.

Ukrainian and Russian forces exchanged projectile and rocket fire in the northwest of the city, according to AFP journalists.

Civilians rushed to take refuge when the bombings set fire to a building near a warehouse, across the street from a shopping mall with a multiplex cinema.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said that “the death toll is not yet known” in the theater, but the air strike showed that “Russia has become a terrorist state”.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken emphasized that attacking civilians was a “war crime,” while the Group of Seven Most Industrialized Countries warned that the perpetrators would be “responsible.”

In besieged Mariupol, to the south, where authorities say 30,000 civilians have fled, rescuers were searching through the smoking rubble of the Drama Theater.

Ukrainian officials said that more than 1,000 civilians had taken refuge in a bomb shelter in the basement of the theater and that Russian bombardments continued. Human Rights Watch said there were at least 500.

US President Joe Biden called Putin a “war criminal”, prompting fury in the Kremlin, as the Russian leader also lashed out at “scum and traitors” at home who he said were undermining the war effort.

Without offering evidence, the Russian Ministry of Defense accused the far-right Azov Battalion of Ukraine of blowing up the theater in Mariupol.

Local authorities say that more than 2,000 people have been killed so far in the indiscriminate Chechen-style bombing of the port city, and 80 percent of its homes have been destroyed.

(With information from Reuters and AFP)

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