LVIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said early Sunday that the siege of the port city of Mariupol would go down in history for what he called war crimes committed by Russian forces.
“To do with a peaceful city what the occupiers did is terror that will be remembered for centuries to come,” Zelensky said in a video message to the nation.
Russian troops pushed deeper into the besieged and destroyed city, where fierce fighting brought a large steel plant to a standstill, and local authorities turned to the West for more help.
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, 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.
The fall of Mariupol, the site of the worst suffering of the war, marked a major battlefield offensive for the Russians, who were largely bogged down outside major cities more than three weeks after the biggest land invasion of Europe since World War II.
“Children, old people are dying. The city is destroyed and wiped off the face of the earth,” Mariupol policeman Mikhail Vershnin said from a littered street in a video message to Western leaders, the authenticity of which was confirmed by the Associated Press.
Details also began to emerge on Saturday about a rocket attack that killed 40 marines in the southern city of Mykolaiv a day earlier, a Ukrainian military official who spoke to The New York Times said.
Russian forces have already cut off Mariupol from the Sea of Azov, and its fall will link Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, to eastern territories controlled by Moscow-backed separatists. It would mark a rare advance in the face of fierce Ukrainian resistance, which dashed Russia’s hopes for a quick victory and galvanized the West.
Ukrainian and Russian troops entered the battle for the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, said Vadim Denisenko, adviser to the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine. “In fact, one of the largest metallurgical plants in Europe is being destroyed,” Denisenko said in a televised address.
A few hours later, the Mariupol City Council announced that Russian soldiers had forcibly relocated to Russia several thousand of the city’s residents, mostly women and children. Exactly where is not reported, and the AP cannot immediately confirm this claim.
Zelensky’s adviser Oleksiy Arestovich said that the nearest forces that could help Mariupol are already struggling with “overwhelming enemy forces” and that “there is no military solution for Mariupol at the moment.”
Despite the siege of Mariupol, many remain amazed by Ukraine’s ability to deter its much larger and better armed adversary. The British Ministry of Defense said that Ukrainian airspace continues to be effectively guarded.
“Gaining control of the air was one of Russia’s main goals in the early days of the conflict, and their continued failure to do so has significantly slowed their operational progress,” the ministry said on Twitter.
The ministry said that Russia currently relies on remote weapons launched from relatively safe Russian airspace to hit targets inside Ukraine.
In Nikolaev, rescuers searched for the ruins of a marine barracks that was destroyed by rocket fire on Friday. The regional governor said the Marines were asleep when the attack took place.
It was not clear how many Marines were inside at the time, and rescuers were still looking for survivors the next day. But a senior Ukrainian military official who spoke to The New York Times on condition of anonymity to reveal confidential information estimated that up to 40 Marines were killed, making it one of the deadliest known attacks on Ukrainian forces during the war.
Mortality estimates in Russia vary greatly, but even the most modest figures run into a few thousand. Russia lost 64 people in five days of fighting during the 2008 war with Georgia. In 10 years, she lost about 15,000 people in Afghanistan and more than 11,000 during the years of fighting in Chechnya.
According to Dmitry Gorenburg, a Russian security researcher at the Virginia-based CNA think tank, the number of those killed and wounded in Ukraine is approaching the 10 percent declining benchmark. According to Gorenburg, reports of four Russian generals killed on the battlefield – out of about 20 in action – signal a weakening of command.
Russia will need 800,000 troops – almost as many as its field army – to maintain long-term control of Ukraine in the face of armed opposition, said Michael Clarke, former head of Britain’s Royal Combined Arms 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.
On Saturday, the Russian military said it had used its latest hypersonic missile in combat for the first time. Major General Igor Konashenkov said Kinzhal missiles destroyed an underground warehouse of Ukrainian missiles and airborne ammunition in the western region of Ivano-Frankivsk.
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 the US could not confirm the use of a hypersonic missile.
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, more than 3.3 million people left Ukraine as refugees.
The evacuation from Mariupol and other besieged cities took place along eight of the 10 humanitarian corridors, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said, a total of 6,623 people left.
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.
Ukraine and Russia have held several rounds of talks aimed at ending the conflict, but still disagree on a number of issues: Moscow is pushing for the demilitarization of its neighbor, and Kyiv is demanding security guarantees.
Across Ukraine, hospitals, schools and buildings where people sought refuge were attacked.
At least 130 people survived Wednesday’s explosion at a Mariupol theater used as a shelter, but another 1,300 are believed to still be inside, Ukraine’s parliamentary human rights commissioner, Lyudmila Denisova, said Friday.
“We pray that they are all alive, but so far there is no information about them,” Denisova told Ukrainian television.
A satellite image from Maxar Technologies released on Saturday confirmed earlier reports that much of the theater had been destroyed. It also had the word “CHILDREN” written in Russian in large white letters outside the building.
Ukraine’s national police said on Saturday that Russian forces had shelled eight towns and villages in the east of the Donetsk region in the past 24 hours, including Mariupol. Dozens of civilians were killed or injured, and at least 37 houses and facilities were damaged, including a school, a museum and a shopping mall.
In Lviv, Ukraine’s cultural capital that came under fire from Russian rockets on Friday, military veterans trained dozens of civilians in the use of firearms and grenades.
“It’s hard because my hands are very weak, but I can handle it,” said one trainee, 22-year-old Katarina Ishchenko.
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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.