dozens of Ukrainian soldiers killed in Nikolaev, Russian army claims to have managed to enter Mariupol

• The Russian army entered on Friday, March 18, in the city of Mariupol, where at least 300,000 inhabitants are under siege for eighteen days. Street fighting is taking place not far from the city center: from 50 to 100 bombs are dropped on residential areas daily, as well as hundreds of shells and rockets.
• Head of the Russian delegation to negotiations with Kiev said on Friday that he noted the “rapprochement” of positions on the issue of “the status of Ukraine’s neutrality and its non-membership in NATO.” For his part, the President of Ukraine called for a serious discussion, in a solemn video filmed at night in a deserted Kyiv. “It’s time to get together. It’s time to discuss. It’s time to restore territorial integrity and justice for Ukraine,” Volodymyr Zelensky said. “Otherwise, the losses for Russia will be such that it will take several generations to restore them.”
• President of the United States Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping completed their one-hour and fifty-minute interview on Friday.. The United States said on Thursday that China could face reprisals if it “supports Russian aggression.” On Thursday evening, Russia withdrew from a Security Council vote on the resolution due to a lack of support from its closest allies.
• Russian “rockets” destroyed an aircraft repair plant near the Lviv airport, in western Ukraine, near the Polish border, according to city hall. There would be no casualties. Already on Sunday, the Russian army struck a Ukrainian military base in the region.
• Shelling continues in Kyiv and Kharkov, the second largest city in the country, where at least five hundred people have died since the beginning of the war. But the capital, emptied of at least half of its 3.5 million inhabitants, was slowly coming back to life on Thursday after the curfew lifted from Tuesday evening.
• More than 3 million Ukrainians went into exilemainly to Poland, sometimes only the stage of their exodus.

Read all our articles, analyzes and reports about the war in Ukraine:

Live on March 18 can be found here

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