Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has accused Russia’s Vladimir Putin of plotting to erase Ukraine, its history, and its people.

“They don’t know a thing about Kyiv, about our history. But they all have orders to erase our history, erase our country, erase us all,’’ Mr Zelenskiy said in a video, as the seventh day of Moscow’s invasion of its neighbour started with heavy shelling of the Black Sea port of Mariupol.

On Tuesday, Moscow switched to strikes on Ukrainian cities and appeared poised for an advance on Kyiv as the West tightened an economic noose around Russia in retaliation.

However, Mr Zelenskiy said the West’s response was not enough, calling for more international support, including backing Ukraine’s bid to join the European Union.

“This is no time to be neutral,” Mr Zelenskiy pointed out.

Referring to the Tuesday shelling in Kyiv next to Babyn Yar, the site of a World War II massacre of thousands of Jews by German occupation troops and Ukrainian auxiliaries, the president said, “This strike proves that for many people in Russia, our Kyiv is absolutely foreign.”

Ukraine’s south-eastern Azov Sea port of Mariupol was under constant shelling and unable to evacuate the injured, while Kherson, on the Black Sea to the West, was surrounded by invading Russian forces, local authorities said.

“We all died again by Babyn Yar. Although the world has promised again and again that it will never happen again. Don’t you see what is happening? That’s why it is very important now that you, millions of Jews around the world, do not stay silent,” said the Ukrainian president. “Because Nazism is born in silence. Scream about murdering of civilians, scream about murdering of Ukrainians.’’

(Reuters/NAN)