When Russian troops crossed from Belarus into Ukraine in late February, pressing toward Kyiv, they were ordered to block and destroy ‘nationalist resistance.’

Ukrainian authorities ask citizens not to return home yet and further tax the country’s battered energy infrastructure, and Western countries consider how to rebuild Ukraine when the war ends.

Ukrainian officials say the diffuse strikes on power plants and civilian areas made no ‘practical military sense.’

Ukrainians voice hope, and some apprehension, that next month’s legislative polls won’t undercut the staggering flow of U.S. weapons and security aid that Washington has authorized since the start of President Vladimir Putin’s Feb. 24 invasion.

At least 14 regions are targeted as Putin suffers humiliating defeats on the battlefield and looks to retaliate for the bombing of a bridge connecting Russia to Crimea.

The criticism marks the clearest indication yet of turmoil within Russia’s leadership over the stewardship of a war that has gone disastrously wrong for Moscow.

Russian troops abandoned a key Ukrainian city so rapidly that they left the bodies of their comrades in the streets.

In their latest breakthrough, Ukrainian forces penetrated Moscow’s defenses in the strategic southern Kherson region, one of the four areas in Ukraine that Russia is trying to grab and desperately defend.