Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK has warned that Russia could try to starve civilians in order to force the population to surrender.
Vadym Prystaiko said Moscow could resort to the tactic because of a “lack of progress” in taking the country it invaded six days ago.
Giving his assessment of the dire situation across Ukraine, Prystaiko warned that people were running out of food and cash, with ATMs across the country beginning to fail.
He said there may need to be a “military solution” to distributing food across the country, adding: “We have to pump up as much food as we can until all the routes are blocked.”
Prystaiko said that instead of greeting Russian forces with “flowers” as imagined by president Vladimir Putin, the people of Ukraine were offering a fierce resistance to the invasion by throwing “molotov cocktails from their cars”.
Asked by the MP Bob Seely whether Russia strategy was to militarily defeat Ukraine or to put such pressure on cities that they surrender, he replied: “The support and resilience is going so much against his plans and people in Russia themselves start asking questions ‘What are we doing?’”
“I believe they might use the tactics you described in the second part, try to block our cities, try to soften political position, try and maybe … some riots in Ukraine, because of the lack of food, against the government,” he said.
They are fears of further civilian casualties as Russian forces advance on the capital, Kyiv.
A military convoy around 40 miles long is advancing on the city and there are fears that the city will face a barrage of rockets and shells which could inflict devastating civilian casualties.
Prystaiko warned that Ukraine was seeing “enormous losses” of human life, including 770 people who were killed in one building.
This morning Western leaders warned that Putin could resort to increasingly “barbaric tactics” to force Ukraine to surrender.
Deputy prime minister Dominic Raab told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We can expect, for every stutter and stumble, him to try and come back for even more heavy-handed tactics, but that is a sign that the initial phase at least – and this is going to be a long haul – has not lived up to his expectations.”
Speaking in Warsaw, Boris Johnson also accused Putin of unleashing “barbaric and indiscriminate” violence against civilians, condemning his decision to “bomb tower blocks, to send missiles into tower blocks, to kill children, as we are seeing in increasing numbers”.
But he said that Putin had “fatally underestimated” the resistance of the Ukrainian people and the response of the West, which has been to impose hard-hitting sanctions on major banks and oligarchs close to the Kremlin.
Earlier today Raab said Putin and his Kremlin loyalists could find themselves on trial for war crimes in the Hague.
He cited the fact that the former Bosnian Serb politician Radovan Karadzic is now in a UK prison for war crimes following a hearing at the Hague.
“That shows you our willingness to wait for however long it takes to make sure there is accountability for any violations of the law of war,” he told BBC Breakfast.
“The International Criminal Court, the prosecutor...has said that he is looking at the situation very carefully, and if and when the ICC decides to take action the UK, and I’m sure many of our allies, would want to support them practically, logistically in any way possible.”