LVIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian authorities said Sunday that Russian military forces had bombed an art school with about 400 people in the war-torn port city of Mariupol, where the Ukrainian president says the relentless Russian siege will be remembered for centuries.
In less than a week, city officials reported for the second time that a public building in which residents had taken refuge was attacked. The Mariupol theater was hit by a bomb on Wednesday, believed to have contained more than 1,300 people, according to local authorities.
There were no reports of casualties from the hit on the art school, which the Associated Press was unable to verify independently. Ukrainian officials have not reported a raid on the theater since Friday, when they said at least 130 people were rescued.
Mariupol, a strategic port on the Sea of Azov, has been under bombardment for at least three weeks and has endured some of the worst horrors of war in Ukraine. At least 2,300 people died, some had to be buried in mass graves, and food, water and electricity ran out.
“To do with a peaceful city what the occupiers did is terror that will be remembered for centuries,” President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly video address to the nation. “The more Russia uses terror against Ukraine, the worse the consequences for it.”
In recent days, Russian troops have forced their way into the city, cutting it off from the Sea of Azov and destroying a large steel plant. The fall of Mariupol will be an important but costly victory for the Russians, whose advance outside other major cities has been largely halted more than three weeks after the biggest land invasion of Europe since World War II.
In Ukraine’s major cities, hundreds of men, women and children have died as a result of Russian bombardments, and millions of civilians have rushed to underground shelters or fled the country.
In Kyiv, at least 20 babies born by Ukrainian surrogate mothers are stuck in a makeshift bomb shelter, waiting for their parents to travel to a war zone to pick them up. The babies, who are only a few days old, are cared for by nurses who cannot leave the orphanage due to constant shelling from Russian troops trying to surround the city.
In the hard-hit northeastern city of Sumy, authorities evacuated 71 orphans through a humanitarian corridor, regional governor Dmitry Zhivitsky said Sunday. He said the orphans, most of whom need constant medical care, would be sent to an unspecified other country.
Russian shelling has killed at least five civilians, including a 9-year-old boy, in Kharkiv, the second largest city in eastern Ukraine.
The UK Department of Defense said that Russia’s failure to gain control of the skies over Ukraine “significantly stalled their operational progress”, forcing them to rely on remote weapons launched from relatively safe Russian airspace.
A rocket attack on the Black Sea port city of Mykolaiv killed up to 40 marines early Friday, a Ukrainian military official told The New York Times, making it one of the deadliest single strikes against Ukrainian forces.
The Russian Defense Ministry said that in a separate strike, a Kinzhal hypersonic missile struck a Ukrainian fuel depot in Konstantinovka near Nikolaev. On Saturday, the Russian military said it had used the Kinzhal for the first time in combat to destroy an ammunition depot in the Carpathians in western Ukraine.
Russia said the Kinzhal, flown by MiG-31 fighter jets, has a range of up to 2,000 kilometers (about 1,250 miles) and flies at 10 times the speed of sound. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said on Saturday that the US could not confirm the use of a hypersonic missile in Ukraine.
Konashenkov said Kalibr cruise missiles launched by Russian warships from the Caspian Sea were also involved in the attack on a fuel depot in Konstantinovka and were used to destroy an armored plant in northern Ukraine.
Unexpectedly strong Ukrainian resistance dashed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hopes of a quick victory after he ordered his troops to invade Ukraine on February 24.
While the Kremlin said Russia was conducting a “special military operation” against legitimate targets, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said on Saturday that “brutal, brutal methods” against civilians allowed Moscow’s troops to move forward.
UN bodies have confirmed more than 847 civilian deaths since the start of the war, though they acknowledge that actual casualties are likely much higher. According to the UN, about 3.4 million people left Ukraine as refugees.
Mortality estimates in Russia vary greatly, but even the most modest figures run into a few thousand. Reports of deaths on the battlefield of four Russian generals — out of about 20 deployed in Ukraine — suggest a breach of command in combat, said Dmitry Gorenburg, a Russian security researcher at the Virginia-based CNA think tank. Gorenburg said.
Russia will need 800,000 troops — almost as many as its active army — to control Ukraine in the face of prolonged armed resistance, according to Michael Clarke, former head of the UK-based Royal United Services Institute, a defense think tank.
“If the Russians are not going to stage a complete genocide — they can level all the major cities to the ground, and the Ukrainians will rise up against the Russian occupation — there will only be constant guerrilla warfare,” Clark said.
Ukraine and Russia have held several rounds of talks aimed at ending the conflict, but neighboring countries still disagree on a number of issues. Zelensky has said he is ready to reject Ukraine’s NATO bid, but wants some security guarantees from Russia. Moscow insists on the complete demilitarization of Ukraine.
The evacuation from Mariupol and other besieged cities took place along eight of the 10 humanitarian corridors that Ukraine and Russia agreed on Saturday, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said. According to official figures, a total of 6,623 people left Kyiv and other cities.
Vereshchuk said that planned humanitarian aid to the southern city of Kherson, which Russia seized at the start of the war, could not be delivered because the trucks were stopped by Russian troops along the way.
Mariupol authorities said on Sunday that nearly 40,000 people have fled the city in the past week, the vast majority in their own vehicles, despite continued air and artillery shelling.
The Mariupol city council said on Saturday that Russian soldiers forcibly resettled several thousand of the city’s residents, mostly women and children, to Russia. Exactly where is not reported, and the AP cannot immediately confirm this claim.
Some Russians have also fled their country amid a widespread crackdown on dissent. Since the invasion of Ukraine began, police have arrested thousands of anti-war demonstrators, while government agencies have silenced independent media and cut off access to social media such as Facebook and Twitter.
In Ukraine, Zelenskiy on Sunday ordered the suspension of 11 Russian-linked political parties for a period of martial law. The largest of these parties has 44 out of 450 seats in the country’s parliament.
“The actions of politicians aimed at discord and cooperation will not succeed,” the appeal says.
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Associated Press writer Yuri Karmanov in Lvov, Ukraine, and other AP journalists around the world contributed to this report.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine.