In cities and towns in Central Ukraine that have not yet heard the boom of Russian artillery fire, residents spent the weekend preparing furiously for the possibly of an attack.
Outside the large military hospital in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro, people lined up on Sunday to donate warm clothes and water, while a priest moved among the crowd offering sips of holy wine from a silver chalice. He allowed those waiting to kiss the large silver cross he wore on a chain around his neck. Since the war began three days ago, wounded soldiers have been pouring into the hospital, sometimes as many as 80 at a time, largely from the front lines in Ukraine’s east and south, said Serhii Bachynskyi, the hospital’s deputy director. The hospital has 400 beds, but the number of wounded has exceeded that at times in the past few days, he added. Because of Russian aircraft patrolling the skies, it is too dangerous to evacuate the wounded on helicopters. “We’re evacuating with whatever we can; on trains, buses. People are volunteering,” Mr. Bachynskyi said. Across the street, a group of combat medics, who had just arrived in green military trucks with wounded, were smoking cigarettes and preparing to return to the front lines. They would provide few details about what they were seeing at the front, but said that they were not short of work. “Either we fight them off or we will all die,” said one of the medics. “We’re hanging on and will do so to the end.” Before the war began, officials and military analysts warned that Russia could carry out simultaneous attacks on many different regions as a diversionary tactic to draw Ukrainian forces away from the main objective. The result is that nearly all of Ukraine has been put on a war footing. So far, Russian forces have concentrated much of their firepower on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, in the north, but fighting has been raging in other parts of the country as well. It has been particularly fierce in the east where the Russian military has joined with separatists forces in two breakaway Ukrainian enclaves, and in the south, where Russian forces have broken out of the Crimean Peninsula, which President Vladimir V. Putin annexed from Ukraine in 2014. There was growing evidence that despite its superiority over Ukrainian forces, the Russian military was having difficulties getting a foothold in many regions around the country. In Kyiv, Ukrainian soldiers have managed to keep most Russian troops out of the city center. In the northeastern city of Kharkiv, where Russian forces have been pounding outlying villages and neighborhoods with artillery, Russian troops briefly pushed into the city center on Sunday, but were driven back by Ukraine’s military, according to Ukrainian officials.
