LVIV, Ukraine (AP) — As Mariupol’s defenders resisted Russian demands for surrender on Monday, the number of bodies in the ruins of the shelled and besieged Ukrainian city remained uncertain, and the full extent of the horror is not yet known.
With communications down, movement restricted and many residents in hiding, the fate of those inside the art school that was destroyed on Sunday and the theater that was destroyed four days earlier remains unclear.
Over 1,300 people were thought to have taken refuge in the theater and 400 in the art school.
Situated on the shores of the Sea of Azov, Mariupol was a key target that was shelled relentlessly for more than three weeks and saw some of the worst suffering of the war. The fall of the southern port city would help Russia build a land bridge to Crimea, seized from Ukraine in 2014.
But there was no clear picture of how close his capture might be.
“No one can say from the outside whether it is really on the verge of capture,” said Keir Giles, a Russia expert at the British think tank Chatham House.
Over the weekend, Moscow offered a safe exit from Mariupol — one corridor leading east to Russia, another west to other parts of Ukraine — in exchange for surrendering the city before dawn on Monday. Ukraine categorically rejected this proposal long before the deadline.
Mariupol officials said at least 2,300 people died during the siege, some of them buried in mass graves, but fears grew that the number could be much higher.
For those who remained, conditions became harsh. The bombing cut off Mariupol from electricity, water and food, cut off contact with the outside world, plunging the inhabitants into a struggle for survival.
“What is happening in Mariupol is a massive war crime,” said European Union Foreign Minister Josep Borrell.
The pre-war population of Mariupol was about 430,000 people. About a quarter were thought to have left in the first days of the war, while tens of thousands had fled in the last week along the humanitarian corridor. Other attempts were thwarted by the fighting.
Those who managed to get out spoke about the destroyed city.
“The buildings are no longer there,” said Maria Fedorova, 77, who crossed the border into Poland on Monday after five days of travel.
Olga Nikitina, who fled from Mariupol to the western Ukrainian city of Lvov, where she arrived on Sunday, said gunshots blew out her windows and the temperature in her apartment plunged below freezing.
“Fights went for every street. Every house has become a target,” she said.
As Russia intensifies its efforts to subdue Mariupol, its ground offensive elsewhere in the country has been stalled by deadly Ukrainian raids. Western officials and analysts say the conflict is turning into a brutal war of attrition as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces use aircraft and artillery to raze cities from a distance.
In the capital Kyiv, a shopping center in the densely populated Podil district near the city center was reduced to smoking ruins after a shelling late Sunday night that killed eight people, emergency officials said. The attack blew out all the windows in a nearby high-rise building.
Russian military spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov said Ukrainian forces used the mall to store missiles and reload launchers. This claim could not be independently verified.
The UK Ministry of Defense said Ukrainian resistance keeps the bulk of Moscow’s forces more than 25 kilometers (15 miles) from central Kyiv, but the capital “remains Russia’s top military target.”
Amid continued shelling, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko has announced a curfew that will last from Monday evening to Wednesday morning.
Ukrainian authorities also said that Russia shelled a chemical plant near the eastern city of Sumy, ejecting toxic ammonia from a 50-ton tank, and fired cruise missiles at a military training base in the Rivne region in western Ukraine.
Konashenkov said that as a result of the shelling of Rivne, 80 foreign and Ukrainian servicemen were killed. There were no reports of casualties from the Ukrainian side.
In the Black Sea port city of Odessa, authorities said Russian forces had damaged civilian homes in a strike on Monday. The city council said no one was killed.
According to the United Nations, the Russian invasion has forced almost 3.5 million people out of Ukraine. The UN confirmed the deaths of more than 900 civilians, but said the actual losses were likely much higher. Estimates of mortality in Russia vary, but even the most modest figures run into a few thousand.
Talks between Russia and Ukraine continued via video link but failed to bridge the gap between the two sides: the Kremlin is demanding Ukraine disarmament and declaring itself neutral, and Ukraine is demanding mandatory security guarantees and the withdrawal of all Russian troops.
The Russian Foreign Ministry warned that relations with the US were “on the verge of breaking down,” citing US President Joe Biden’s “unacceptable statements” about Putin. Last week, Biden called the Russian leader a war criminal.
In another worrying development, Ukraine’s nuclear regulatory agency said radiation monitors had stopped working around the decommissioned Chernobyl power plant, which was the site of the world’s largest nuclear disaster in 1986.
The agency said the problem, along with a lack of firefighters to protect the area’s radiation-contaminated forests as the weather warms, could mean a “significant deterioration” in the ability to control the spread of radiation in Ukraine and beyond.
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Associated Press writer Yuri Karmanov in Lvov, Ukraine, and other AP journalists around the world contributed to this report.
Follow AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine.