From the New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernici. This is the daily.

The war in Ukraine has now been underway for two weeks.

But Russia has yet to take control of any major Ukrainian cities, except for the southern port of Herzog.

This huge high-tech Russian army, nearly 200,000 soldiers, has failed to take Harkiv.

It's failed to take Odessa, and it's failed to take Kiev.

The Ukrainian resistance has been too strong.

So the state of this war is perhaps best described as eerily stalled.

And for Russia, their answer is to encircle these cities, and from a distance bomb what they can't control.

Over and over.

And what Russia is hitting now seems indiscriminate.

Apartment buildings, factories, universities, hospitals.

Since the war started, there have been more than 700 Russian missile attacks, and the dead are overwhelmingly Ukrainian civilians.

Today, my colleagues Michael Schwartz and Valerie Hopkins send us dispatches on two of those cities in Ukraine's south that are now surrounded and under attack.

It's Thursday, March 10th.

My name is Michael Schwartz, and for the past week or so I've been reporting from Mikhailov, a town that has become a major line of defense against Russia's efforts to push west along the Black Sea.

I've been following a group of Ukrainian soldiers who are daily and nightly fighting with Russian forces trying to prevent them from gaining control of one of Ukraine's most important economic zones, the port in Odessa.

And should that fall, it would probably be a decisive defeat in the war for Ukraine.

I was born ready.

It's okay to do this in English.

If you don't mind, however, however you want to do it.

I arrived in Mikhailov last week and immediately went to see the mayor, Alexander Sinkiewicz.

He was working downtown right in the center of the city at City Hall, and I went up this grand staircase to his office on the second floor.

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