humanitarian consequences will only grow in the days ahead. reporter: which brings us to that stalled russian convoy near kyiv, filled with artillery pieces, long a favorite tool of russian generals. analysts believe if those weapons get moving again and are placed around the city, they could rain devastating fire on military and civilian targets alike. some of these weapons can kill so easily and indiscriminately, many nations have pledged to never use them, and russia says it has not used them in ukraine. but then russia has said a lot about what it s doing in ukraine, much of which is proven untrue. tom foreman, cnn, washington. general wesley clark is a cnn military analyst and former nato supreme allied commander. he s with us this hour from boulder, colorado. general, thank you for being with us. so before this invasion began, there were some estimates out there that russia s military could be done with all of this,
united states. we re going to demonstrate to the whole world no one can split this country. thank you all so very much. thank you. our cnn correspondents are covering this conflict from washington to paris to western russia. they re on the ground in ukraine as well. scott mclean is reporting on the evacuation efforts in lviv. but first we will hear from cnn s chief security correspondent jim sciutto. reporter: russia s invasion of ukraine is gradually gaining ground. the mayor of the city of kherson in the south of the country, with a population of 300,000, has said that the city has now fallen under russian control, adding ukrainian forces are no longer present. the devastation inflicted across ukraine is only growing. russian strikes increasingly targeting civilians. president biden says it s deliberate.
could sweep through ukraine maybe in a couple of weeks. but now we re a week in, and they ve taken just one major city. clearly this is not playing out as putin had planned. what are the problems here? what does he do next? yeah. well, the military may have planned the russian military may have planned to come in there and finish it in a week or two, but they didn t count on the warm weather north of kyiv. that land up there is not frozen, and so the russians have been road bound. this was their main objective. they wanted to sweep into kyiv, take it, and install a puppet government, and they just haven t been able to get there. they ve also discovered that the ukrainians are pretty good fighters. they re, in fact, brilliant against an overwhelming force. and so the russians have had very, very tough going north of kyiv in large part because of fierce resistance but also because of the trafficability of the ground. it s been different elsewhere in the country not because the ukrain
target number two. for days zelenskyy has been leading the resistance using social media to call on ukrainians to fight. the world has seen that ukrainians are powerful, ukrainians are courageous. just this morning on his facebook page he posted this about russia s bombing campaign. they have an order to erase our history, our country, erase all of us. he went on to call ukrainians a symbol of invincibility. a day early zelenskyy got a standing ovation with the parliament for inspiring words like this. every square of today, no matter what it is called it is going to be called as freedom square. in every city of our country. nobody is going to break us. we are strong. we are ukrainians. zelenskyy has won the hearts of many around the world inspired by his resilience and
have experienced logistics and sustainment challenges, challenges that we don t believe they have fully that they fully anticipated. and, three, they are getting resistance from the ukrainians. ukraine is trying to hold off a russian attack on its second largest city, kharkiv. ukrainian emergency officials say the center of the city was pounded with massive shelling and bombing on wednesday. over the past several hours, videos and photos on social media show the city s assumption cathedral has been damaged along with at least three schools. cnn s fred pleitgen reports from just across the border from kharkiv. reporter: from my vantage point on belgorod, across from that major battlefield in kharkiv, it seems as though the russian military seems to be intensifying their campaign to take kharkiv. one of the things we ve heard in the past couple of days was jets in the air. there seems to be a lot of activity by the russian air