Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Nicolás Maduro yes­ter­day ex­pressed his firm sup­port for Rus­sia’s “spe­cial mil­i­tary op­er­a­tion” in Ukraine in a tele­phone con­ver­sa­tion with his Russ­ian coun­ter­part, Vladimir Putin, ac­cord­ing to the Krem­lin.

“Nicolás Maduro ex­pressed his strong sup­port for Rus­sia’s de­ci­sive ac­tions and con­demned the desta­bil­is­ing ac­tiv­i­ties of the Unit­ed States and NA­TO,” the of­fi­cial state­ment said.

The Venezue­lan pres­i­dent al­so em­pha­sized “the im­por­tance of coun­ter­ing the cam­paign of lies and dis­in­for­ma­tion launched by West­ern coun­tries.”

Dur­ing the con­ver­sa­tion, which took place at the ini­tia­tive of the Venezue­lan side, Putin shared with Maduro his vi­sion of the de­vel­op­ment of events around Ukraine and em­pha­sized that the Russ­ian ob­jec­tive is to pro­tect the civil­ian pop­u­la­tion of Don­bas and achieve recog­ni­tion of the peo­ple’s re­publics of Donet­sk and Luhan­sk on the part of Kiev, adds the note.

Putin al­so men­tioned among Rus­sia’s ob­jec­tives Ukraine’s recog­ni­tion of Russ­ian sov­er­eign­ty over the Crimean penin­su­la, an­nexed in 2014, the de­mil­i­tari­sa­tion and de­naz­i­fi­ca­tion of the neigh­bour­ing coun­try, as well as guar­an­tees of its non-nu­clear and neu­tral sta­tus with re­spect to NA­TO.

Both pres­i­dents al­so ad­dressed is­sues of bi­lat­er­al strate­gic as­so­ci­a­tion and the im­ple­men­ta­tion of joint projects.

It was agreed to con­tin­ue con­tacts at dif­fer­ent lev­els, the state­ment con­cludes.

Mean­while, Russ­ian forces es­ca­lat­ed their at­tacks on crowd­ed ur­ban ar­eas Tues­day, bom­bard­ing the cen­tral square in Ukraine’s sec­ond-biggest city and Kyiv’s main TV tow­er in what the coun­try’s pres­i­dent called a bla­tant cam­paign of ter­ror.

“No­body will for­give. No­body will for­get,” Pres­i­dent Volodymyr Ze­len­skyy vowed af­ter the blood­shed on the square in Kharkiv.

Ukrain­ian au­thor­i­ties said five peo­ple were killed in the at­tack on the TV tow­er, which is a cou­ple of miles from cen­tral Kyiv and a short walk from nu­mer­ous apart­ment build­ings. A TV con­trol room and pow­er sub­sta­tion were hit, and at least some Ukrain­ian chan­nels briefly stopped broad­cast­ing, of­fi­cials said.

Ze­len­skyy’s of­fice al­so re­port­ed a pow­er­ful mis­sile at­tack on the site of the Babi Yar Holo­caust memo­r­i­al, near the tow­er. A spokesman for the memo­r­i­al said a Jew­ish ceme­tery at the site, where Nazi oc­cu­piers killed more than 33,000 Jews over two days in 1941, was dam­aged, but the ex­tent would not be clear un­til day­light.

At the same time, a 40-mile (64-kilo­me­tre) con­voy of hun­dreds of Russ­ian tanks and oth­er ve­hi­cles ad­vanced slow­ly on Kyiv, the cap­i­tal city of near­ly 3 mil­lion peo­ple, in what the West feared was a bid by Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin to top­ple the gov­ern­ment and in­stall a Krem­lin-friend­ly regime.

The in­vad­ing forces al­so pressed their as­sault on oth­er towns and cities, in­clud­ing the strate­gic ports of Ode­sa and Mar­i­upol in the south.

CLICK FOR MORE STO­RIES