Ukraine conflict: Dread in Kyiv as huge Russian convoy advances

There's a biting cold in Ukraine's capital.

The first day of March swept in with an icy blast of wind and snow; the sixth day of Russia's invasion unfolds with a gnawing sense of foreboding. Satellite images convey, with searing clarity, the pace of Russia's progress towards Kyiv. A serpentine armoured convoy, some 65km (40 miles) long, bristling with tanks and troops, slowly snakes forward. It's only 27km away.

It gives an entirely new, and terrifying, meaning to the expression "the world is watching". Everyone can see these satellite images in shades of black and grey, which have a meaning that's all too black and white. But it's only Ukrainian forces, soldiers and civilians who can stop its lumbering advance. Western militaries continue to send in weapons and ammunition, and incessant salvos of strong words. On the ground, Ukraine is on its own.

"We'll burn the convoy," a Ukrainian journalist vows when I meet him in a basement shelter. It's this raw resolve, and burning patriotism, which has fired Ukraine's unexpectedly strong resistance to the mighty Russian army's advance.

"We didn't sleep last night," his mother Liana confides. "I was on the phone talking to relatives and friends in other cities." A friend who fled to neighbouring Poland calls, crying, that her home was obliterated by a Russian missile. Liana's father is still in their home further north, closer to the Russian border, near Chernobyl, now occupied by Russian forces. He managed to call, on a poor phone signal, to tell her a missile had slammed into their vegetable garden, 100m (328ft) from his room. "I told him so many times he should have let me buy him a good phone so he could send us pictures," she laments.

Next to her, a bulky cat carrier is empty. Their whopping Maine Coon cat, named Tyson after Britain's champion boxer, hasn't lived up to his name. He mostly hides under a bed above ground. But sometimes he comes down to snuggle with Rustam; it makes us both feel better.

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