Ukrainian President Zelensky has been missing for about an hour, while Spetsnaz have launched an attack on the presidential palace in Kiev, as “all the telephone lines he uses have been silenced“, according to Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, with whom he had agreed to speak at a specific time.

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Photos released two hours ago show him in a helmet and bulletproof vest waiting for a vehicle to remove him from the presidential palace while his personal guard, which includes American and British mercenaries, covers the perimeter of his departure.

There is anguish over his fate, but another source says he has been flown to a secret bunker to escape capture and is not communicating in a conventional way with anyone, apart from a special mobile phone supplied by the Americans which it is hoped is evading the Russians‘ electronic intelligence gathering devices.

All this, while Kalibr cruise missiles have been hitting government buildings in Kiev since this morning, destroying military infrastructure and command centres used by the American and British military to organise the defence of the Ukrainian regime.

However, at the political level, everything is over for Zelensky, who until a few hours ago declared that he was “ready to face any Russian attack“, while at the military level, only the two cities where the Russian-speaking population is in the majority, Kharkiv and Mariupol, are controlled but not occupied by the Russian forces, which are proceeding with great caution because they do not want civilian casualties and infrastructure destruction.

Odessa, whose Ukrainian military bases have been subjected to an unprecedented artillery barrage since yesterday by the Republic of Transnistria, where Russian forces are based, is also under military control without being occupied.

In the evening Melitopolis in the west of Mariupol fell in the evening amid enthusiasm from the Russian-speaking inhabitants who make up 80% of the population, with the mayor of the city announcing it with joy.

Melitopolis is just 39 km away. from the Sea of Azov and with its occupation from the west the Russian “pincer” around Mariupol was closed, as the city was already besieged from the north and east by Russian armies entering from Donetsk.

With the surrender of Mariupol and Odessa, Ukraine ceases to have an outlet to the sea. By tomorrow evening at the latest, the Ukrainian garrison of Mariupol is expected to have surrendered. The battle of Zaporizhzhya is over, the Russian forces control the road connecting it to Mariupol.

The Russian Ministry of Defence also announced that it had restored the North Crimean Water Canal that supplied water to the whole of Crimea and that the Ukrainian neo-Nazis had cut off the water supply since 2014 to leave the inhabitants thirsty!

In Kharkiv, the bulk of the Ukrainian troops are trapped inside the urban fabric in order to use the civilians as a “shield” against Russian bombing.

At the same time, the records of units to date show that the Russian operation has absorbed only 48% of the ground forces they have concentrated in the area and less than 20% of the air force and 40% of the other air assets. Only the Ka-52 attack helicopters and the Mi-24/-35 gunship have operational utilisation rates of up to 80% as they are ahead of all ground operations.

Only 60 Battalions entered Ukraine out of at least 125 that the Americans reported to have been brought to the Ukrainian border.

Russian forces have entered the Mykolaiv Region, which is already under Russian control as it did not even have a Russian Army.

Russian forces in a lightning amphibious operation captured and captured the garrison on the island of Zmiinyi in the Black Sea, which is only 20 miles from Romania.