What did 2 March 2022 show about the war?

What was the picture across Ukraine on 2 March 2022, the seventh day of the Russian invasion? It was a day of competing claims on the ground, attacks on civilian areas and a widening set of diplomatic and legal responses.

Contested ground

In the south, Russian Ground Forces said they had captured the Black Sea port of Kherson. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense denied this and said the battle was continuing. Russia also said its troops had captured the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the largest in Europe. The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that Russia had communicated that the plant was under its control, and that personnel there were continuing their normal duties.

Ukrainian forces, for their part, began an offensive towards Horlivka. Over Kyiv, the Ukrainian Air Force said it had destroyed two Russian warplanes in a dogfight, while a Ukrainian MiG-29 was also shot down.

Strikes on cities and ports

Russian forces launched airstrikes on Kharkiv National University and a local police department. In Chernihiv, two Kalibr cruise missiles struck a hospital after Russian troops had been forced to retreat. The mayor of Mariupol reported mass casualties and a water outage caused by what he described as non-stop Russian bombardment.

The war also reached foreign shipping. A missile struck the Bangladeshi-flagged cargo ship Banglar Samriddhi, docked at the Port of Olvia in Mykolaiv Oblast, and killed a Bangladeshi engineer.

International responses

An emergency special session of the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution calling for Russia to end the invasion. The European Court of Human Rights, in a move described as unprecedented, suspended all judicial proceedings against Ukraine pending before it.

At sea, Turkey said the Russian Navy had cancelled the transit of four of its warships through the Bosporus. This followed Turkey triggering the wartime clause of the Montreux Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits, which allows Ankara to close the Bosporus and the Dardanelles to foreign warships.

In Washington, Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby announced that the United States would postpone a Minuteman III ICBM test in an effort to de-escalate tensions between Russia and Ukraine.

Why the day mattered

Taken together, the day's events show three tracks running at once. On the battlefield, both sides made claims about control of key places, and the Kherson dispute showed that even basic questions of who held a city were disputed. Against civilians and infrastructure, the strikes on a university, a police department, a hospital, a port and a besieged city's water supply marked the widening human cost. Internationally, bodies from the UN to a European court and a NATO member controlling a strategic strait moved to register opposition or limit the war's reach.

The Zaporizhzhia announcement stood out in particular: a nuclear plant was reported under Russian control while its staff kept working, a combination that drew the attention of the International Atomic Energy Agency.