LVIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin warned on Saturday that Ukrainian statehood is under threat and likened Western sanctions on Russia to a “declaration of war” as a promised ceasefire in the besieged port city of Mariupol collapsed amid terror scenes. .
As the Kremlin’s rhetoric grew more vehement and the respite from the fighting faded, Russian troops continued to shell the besieged cities, and the number of Ukrainians expelled from their country rose to 1.4 million.
Orphaned mothers mourned their dead children, wounded soldiers were tourniqueted, and doctors worked by the light of their mobile phones when despondency and despair reigned. Putin continued to blame all this directly on the Ukrainian leadership and criticized their resistance to the invasion.
“If they continue to do what they are doing, they will call into question the future of Ukrainian statehood,” he said. “And if this happens, it will be completely on their conscience.”
He also spoke out against Western sanctions that have hurt the Russian economy and led to a fall in the value of its currency.
“These sanctions that are being introduced are akin to a declaration of war,” he said during a televised meeting with flight attendants from the Russian airline Aeroflot. “But, thank God, we haven’t gotten to that place yet.
Ten days after the Russian invasion, the struggle to maintain a temporary ceasefire in Mariupol and the eastern city of Volnovakha has shown the fragility of efforts to end hostilities across Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials said Russian artillery and airstrikes prevented residents from leaving before the agreed evacuation began. Putin accused Ukraine of sabotaging those efforts.
On Monday, the third round of talks between Russia and Ukraine will take place, said member of the Ukrainian delegation David Arakhamia. He did not provide any further details, including where they would be held.
Previous meetings were held in Belarus and led to the failure of a ceasefire agreement to create humanitarian corridors to evacuate children, women and the elderly from besieged cities, where pharmacies were empty, hundreds of thousands of people were facing food and water shortages, and the wounded died from their wounds.
In a commentary broadcast by Ukrainian television, Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko said thousands of residents had gathered to safely exit the city when shelling began on Saturday.
“We value the life of every resident of Mariupol and cannot risk it, so the evacuation was stopped,” he said.
The West has given Ukraine broad support, offering aid and weapons, and imposing extensive sanctions on Russia. But the struggle itself was left to the Ukrainians, who expressed a mixture of courageous determination and despondency.
“Ukraine is bleeding,” Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said in a video released on Saturday, “but Ukraine has not fallen.”
Russian troops advanced on a third nuclear power plant on Saturday, having already taken control of two of the four operating in the country. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has pleaded with US lawmakers for more help, even though he insisted the enemy had been defeated.
“We are inflicting losses on the occupiers whom they could not see in their nightmare,” Zelensky said.
Russian troops took control of the southern port city of Kherson this week. Zelenskiy said on Saturday that while they had surrounded Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Chernihiv and Sumy, Ukrainian forces had managed to maintain control over key cities in central and southeastern Ukraine.
Diplomatic efforts continued when US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken arrived in Poland for a meeting with the prime minister and foreign minister, a day after attending a NATO meeting in Brussels where the alliance pledged to increase support for members of the eastern flank.
In Moscow, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett met with Putin in the Kremlin. Israel has good relations with both Russia and Ukraine, and Bennett offered to mediate the conflict, but no details of Saturday’s meeting have surfaced.
In the wake of Western sanctions, Aeroflot, Russia’s leading state-owned airline, announced that it plans to stop all international flights except Belarus from Tuesday.
The death toll from the conflict was difficult to measure, but it certainly exceeded 1,000.
The UN Human Rights Office has said that at least 351 civilians have been killed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, but the real number is likely much higher. The Russian military, which does not release regular casualty figures, said on Wednesday that 498 service members had died.
The Ukrainian armed forces are vastly outnumbered by the Russians, but its professional and volunteer forces are fighting back with fierce tenacity. Even in the fallen cities there were signs of resistance.
Spectators in Chernihiv cheered as they watched a Russian military plane fall from the sky and crash, according to a video released on Saturday by the Ukrainian government. In Kherson, hundreds of people protested the invasion, waving the blue and yellow flag of Ukraine and shouting “Go home.”
Zelenskiy has encouraged protests that have brought thousands to the streets of Russian-occupied cities.
“Attack!” he called. “You must go outside! You must fight!”
A huge Russian armored column threatening the capital of Ukraine remained blocked near Kiev. Oleksiy Arestovich, an adviser to the President of Ukraine, said on Saturday afternoon that the military situation had become generally calmer and that Russian forces “have not taken active action since the morning.”
While the shelling in Mariupol demonstrated Russia’s determination to cut Ukraine off from access to the Black and Azov Seas, further hurting the country’s economy, it was Putin who was most aggressive, warning that the flight zone would be banned. considered a hostile act.
NATO has said it has no plans to introduce such a no-fly zone, which would ban all unauthorized aircraft from flying over Ukraine. Western officials said the main reason was the desire not to spread the war beyond Ukraine.
Zelensky advocated a no-fly zone over his country and lashed out at NATO for refusing to impose one, warning that “all the people who die from this day forward will also die because of you.”
But while the US and other NATO members are sending weapons to Kiev, the conflict is already being drawn into countries far beyond Ukraine.
While Russia is cracking down on independent media covering the war, larger international news outlets have said they are suspending their operations in the country. Putin said that at the moment there are no grounds for imposing martial law.
And, warning of a coming hunger crisis, the UN World Food Program said that millions of people in Ukraine, the world’s top supplier of wheat, would “immediately” be in need of food aid.
On Saturday, the President of Ukraine held a video conference call with US senators as Congress considers a request for $10 billion in emergency funding for humanitarian and security needs. The UN has said it will increase its humanitarian operations both inside and outside Ukraine, and its Security Council has scheduled an open meeting on Monday about the deteriorating humanitarian situation.
Kyiv’s central railway station was still crowded with people desperately trying to flee. “People just want to live,” said one woman, Xenia.
Elsewhere in the capital, in a sign that nerves were close to breaking point, two people on the pavement froze in place at the sound of a sharp blow. It was a garbage truck overturning a trash can.
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Associated Press reporters from around the world contributed to this report.
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Follow AP reporting on the Ukraine crisis at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine.