- ‘There is nothing left’ of Mariupol – President
- At least 100,000 people want to leave the city – Deputy Prime Minister
- Ukraine says 2,389 children were brought to Russia
- 300,000 in occupied Cherson are running out of food – Ukraine
- Biden is visiting Brussels, Poland this week
Lviv/Kyiv, Ukraine, March 22 – Intense Russian airstrikes hit the besieged Ukrainian port city of Mariupol and street fighting raged on Tuesday, a day after Moscow’s call for surrender was rejected, Ukrainian officials said.
The city council said the bombings would turn Mariupol into “the ashes of a dead country”.
Russia’s RIA news agency said Russian forces and Russian-backed separatist units had taken about half of the city, citing a separatist leader.
Donetsk region governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said street fighting was taking place there and both civilians and Ukrainian troops were coming under Russian fire.
On the 27th day of the war in Ukraine, the plight of the civilian population in Mariupol, which normally has a population of 400,000, became increasingly desperate. Hundreds of thousands are believed to be trapped indoors with no access to food, water, electricity or heat.
“There is nothing left,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a video address to the Italian parliament.
Deputy Mayor Sergei Orlov told CNN the city was under a total blockade and had not received any humanitarian aid.
“The city is constantly being bombed, from 50 bombs to 100 bombs dropped by Russian planes every day… A lot of death, a lot of weeping, a lot of horrific war crimes,” Orlov said.
Mariupol has become the focal point of the war that broke out on February 24 when Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his troops across the border to demilitarize Ukraine and replace its pro-Western leadership.
It lies on the Sea of Azov and its capture would allow Russia to link pro-Russian separatist-held areas to the east with the Crimean peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014.
After failing to capture the capital, Kyiv, or any other major city with a swift offensive, Russian forces are waging a war of attrition that has reduced some urban areas to rubble and taken a heavy civilian toll.
The United Nations Human Rights Office in Geneva said on Tuesday that it had recorded 953 civilian deaths and 1,557 wounded since the invasion. The Kremlin denies attacks on civilians.
Western officials said Tuesday Russian forces have stalled around Kyiv but are making some advances in the south and east. Ukrainian fighters are fighting off Russian troops in some places but are unable to push them back, they said.
However, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said “no one” ever thought that the operation in Ukraine would last only a few days and that the campaign would go according to plan, the TASS news agency reported.
Western nations prepared to impose more sanctions on Russia to force it to reconsider its actions. They will also tighten existing measures and increase Russia’s isolation from international trade and finance.
US President Joe Biden will meet with other Western leaders for talks in Brussels, where NATO and the European Union are based, on Thursday. Then he wants to travel to Poland, which has taken in around 2.1 million refugees from neighboring Ukraine.
US national security adviser Jake Sullivan has said Biden will announce measures to reduce Europe’s dependence on Russian gas — a major hurdle in Western efforts to isolate Moscow economically.
Smoke billows around an industrial site after multiple explosions amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in Mariupol, in this screenshot from video released March 22, 2022. AZOV/Handout via REUTERS THIS PICTURE WAS SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. NO RESALE. NO ARCHIVES. MANDATORY CREDIT
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Leaders will also coordinate the next phase of military aid to Ukraine, Sullivan said. Continue reading
WASTELAND
A Reuters team that reached a Russian-held part of Mariupol on Sunday described a wasteland of charred apartment blocks and corpses wrapped in blankets lying by a road. Continue reading
Ukraine says Russian shells, bombs and rockets hit a theater, art school and other public buildings, burying hundreds of women and children sheltering in basements.
Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk called on Ukrainian television on Tuesday for the opening of a humanitarian corridor for civilians. She said at least 100,000 people wanted to leave Mariupol but couldn’t.
Referring to Russia’s earlier demand that the city surrender by Monday morning, Vereshchuk said: “Our military is heroically defending Mariupol. We did not accept the ultimatum.
Kyiv accused Moscow of deporting residents of Mariupol and separatist-controlled areas of Ukraine to Russia. This includes the “forced transfer” of 2,389 children from the Luhansk and Donetsk regions to Russia, said Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova.
Moscow denies forcing people to leave the country and says it is taking in refugees.
Ukraine also accused Russia of blocking humanitarian access to Kherson, which lies northwest of Crimea and is the only provincial capital it has captured. The State Department said Kherson’s 300,000 residents are running out of food.
The conflict has so far displaced almost a quarter of Ukraine’s 44 million people, including some 3.5 million – half of them children – who have fled abroad.
MOURNING HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR
Speaking to Italian lawmakers, Zelenskyy said the war would bring famine to other countries. Ukraine is one of the world’s largest grain exporters, and the war has caused global prices for staple foods to soar to record levels.
“How can we sow under the blows of Russian artillery?” he said. Continue reading
In a late-night speech, Zelenskyi also drew attention to the death of Boris Romanchenko, 96, who survived three Nazi concentration camps during World War II but was killed last week when his block of flats in besieged Kharkiv was shelled.
By killing Romanchenko, “Putin has ‘done’ what even Hitler could not,” Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said.
In Russia, a court has sentenced Alexei Navalny, Putin’s main political opponent, to a new nine-year prison term for fraud and contempt of court. Continue reading
Navalny was already serving a two-and-a-half-year sentence in a prison camp east of Moscow for probation violations related to charges he says were fabricated to thwart his political ambitions.
After the verdict was announced, he said on Twitter: “The best support for me and other political prisoners is not sympathy and kind words, but actions. Any activity against the fraudulent and thieving Putin regime. Any opposition to these war criminals.”
Reporting from Reuters Bureaus Writing by Peter Graff and Angus MacSwan, Editing by Mark Heinrich and Gareth Jones