WIPED OUT
Martial arts champion, 16, killed alongside entire family as merciless Russian shelling blitzed homes in Ukraine city
RUSSIAN airstrikes have killed one of Ukraine's most talented young martial artists along with his entire family.
Teenager Artyom Priymenko was wiped out in an attack on the eastern Ukrainian city of Sumy.
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The 16-year-old was a champion at sambo, a contact sport loved by Vladimir Putin.
He was killed alongside his father Vitaly, mother Ekaterina, his two younger brothers Egor and Kirill, and his grandmother.
"This is a great sorrow for the family of sambo wrestlers, his relatives, and for all of us," his coach Evgeny Leonenko said announcing the deaths.
Artyom and his family were among 21 killed in a Russian airstrike in Sumy late on Monday night.
The nighttime bombing raid came 11 hours before the Russians opened a humanitarian corridor at 9am local time on Tuesday, allowing 5,000 civilians to evacuate the city.
Sambo is a Russian martial art popular across the former Soviet Union.
It originated in the 1920s when members of the newly-formed Red Army developed their own hand-to-hand combat technique.
"Artyom was a multiple winner of the Ukrainian Sambo Championships," Leonenko said.
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"Last year he won a gold medal in Kherson in the 88kg weight.
"He won a place in the Ukrainian national team for the World Cup in the Netherlands. He was very promising."
President Vladimir Putin was a keen sambo and judo wrestler as a child.
His former coach, now the International Sambo Federation president Vasuky Shestakov, 68, once claimed Putin could have been a top-level competitor.
Instead, he joined the feared Soviet secret service the KGB, later going into local politics in his home city of St Petersburg after the USSR collapsed, before eventually rising to president.
"Sambo and judo may have lost a great athlete, but the country has found a great president," Shestakov once said.
Putin has personally vowed to make sambo an Olympic sport.
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It comes as...
- A Russian airstrike has struck a maternity hospital in Mariupol, with reports of women and children killed
- The CIA has warned a "desperate" Vladimir Putin could deploy mini-nukes to try and turn the invasion around
- Russian troops are stuck outside Kyiv and at risk of freezing to death as temperatures plunge to -20C
- Boxer Wladimir Klitschko says he's in the "biggest fight of my life" against Vladimir Putin's army
- Thousands of Ukrainian refugees could come to Britain as a new route to open 'in days'
- Russian planes entering Britain's air space could be seized under a new law announced by Transport Secretary Grant Shapps
- A serving Queen's Guard, 19, has gone AWOL to fight in Ukraine
- A little girl filmed singing 'Let It Go' in a Ukrainian bomb shelter has safely fled to Poland
In the wake of Artyom's death, one commentator on social media, Alexey Shershnev, posted: "Please send this terrible news to Putin's childhood friend, the president of the International Sambo Federation Vasily Shestakov - a decent man - and Russian fighters.
"Perhaps this will change their attitude to the 'special military operation'."
Russia has repeatedly denied it is targeting civilians and claims it is only striking military targets.
Despite that, the civilian death toll is rising every day, including a number of children.
More than two million refugees have already fled Ukraine, with over half travelling to Poland.
Putin's tightly-controlled state media claims the desperate population are "fleeing the terror organised by local nationalists," rather than Russia's forces.
He was very promising
Evgeny Leonenko
Meanwhile, Russia's stranded troops are facing freezing to death in their tanks as Putin's military becomes bogged down in the mud and an unwinnable war in Ukraine, sources claim.
A 40-mile long convoy of tanks and armoured vehicles remains trapped outside Kyiv, more than a week after launching their assault on the Ukrainian capital.
As a sudden cold snap sends temperatures in Eastern Europe plunging to -10C overnight - or -20C including windchill - Russian troops are trapped in what one ex-soldier called "40-ton iron freezers".
Icy conditions are also set to make life even harder for Putin's invaders, who have been stuck around 20 miles from Kyiv for days amid mechanical problems, fuel supply issues, and solid Ukrainian resistance.
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Aerial satellite images taken on Wednesday morning show the traffic jam of Russian military vehicle close to Antonov Airport, just a few miles northwest of the outskirts of Kyiv.
Just south of Antonov, in the besieged city of Irpin, a badly-damaged bridge can be seen, further slowing down the Russian advance.
Traffic can be seen queuing around the bridge, suggesting Russia's military may be continuing to press on towards Kyiv after two weeks of slow progress.
The large military convoy was first photographed on February 28, according to satellite images released on Tuesday by Maxar Technologies.
Yesterday, a senior US defence official said the convoy hadn't advanced beyond Hostomel, near Antonov Airport.
Russian forces are reportedly trying to reach Kyiv through other directions, the official noted.
Former British Army Major Kevin Price told the that Russia's tanks will become nothing more than "40-ton freezers" as temperatures plummet, and said that the bitter conditions will further dampen the morale of the Russian military.
Glen Grant, a senior defence expert at the Baltic Security Foundation, said unless the Russian convoy is refuelled and able to get moving again, many soldiers will have to surrender or face freezing to death.
"You just can't sit around and wait because if you are in the vehicle you are waiting to be killed," he told Newsweek
"They are not stupid."
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Already, reports are coming in of demoralised Russian troops complaining about the war in intercepted phone calls to comrades and loved ones.
In the calls, Putin's troops claim the war could drag on for "months" and say they are being "massacred" in Ukraine.
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