Ukraine refugee count passes 1 million; Russians besiege ports

Kyiv: More than 1 million people have fled Ukraine following Russia's invasion, in the swiftest refugee exodus this century, the United Nations said Thursday, as Russian forces kept up their bombardment of the country's second-biggest city, Kharkiv, and laid siege to two strategic seaports.

The tally the U.N. refugee agency released to The Associated Press was reached Wednesday and amounts to more than 2% of Ukraine's population being forced out of the country in less than a week.

The mass evacuation could be seen in Kharkiv, where residents desperate to escape falling shells and bombs crowded the city's train station and pressed onto trains, not always knowing where they were headed.

Overnight, Associated Press reporters in Kyiv heard at least one explosion before videos started circulating of apparent strikes on the capital.

Russia's Defense Ministry said it had knocked out a reserve broadcasting center in the Lysa Hora district, about 7 kilometers (4 miles) south of the government headquarters. It said unspecified precision weapons were used, and that there were no casualties or damage to residential buildings.

A statement from the general staff of Ukraine's armed forces didn't address the strikes, saying only that Russian forces were regrouping and trying to reach the northern outskirts of the city.

The advance on Kyiv has been rather not very organized and now they're more or less stuck, military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer told the AP in Moscow. In a videotaped address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called on Ukrainians to keep up the resistance. He vowed that the invaders would have not one quiet moment and described Russian soldiers as confused children who have been used.

Moscow's isolation deepened when most of the world lined up against it at the United Nations to demand it withdraw from Ukraine. And the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court opened an investigation into possible war crimes. Felgenhauer said with the Russian economy already suffering, there could be a serious internal political crisis if Russian President Vladimir Putin does not find a way to end the war quickly.

There's no real money to run to fight this war," he said, adding that if Putin and the military "are unable to wrap up this campaign very swiftly and victoriously, they're in a pickle.

With fighting continuing on multiple fronts across Ukraine, Britain's Defense Ministry said Mariupol, a large city on the Azov Sea, was encircled by Russian forces, while the status of another vital port, Kherson, a Black Sea shipbuilding city of 280,000, remained unclear.

Ukraine's military said Russian forces did not achieve the main goal of capturing Mariupol in its statement, which did not mention Kherson.

Putin's forces claimed to have taken complete control of Kherson, which would be the biggest city to fall in the invasion. A senior US defence official disputed that.