Russian forces pounding the port city of Mariupol shelled a mosque sheltering more than 80 people, including children, the Ukrainian government said yesterday as fighting also raged on the outskirts of the capital, Kyiv.
There was no immediate word of casualties from the shelling of the mosque. Mariupol has seen some of the greatest misery from Russia’s war in Ukraine as unceasing barrages have thwarted repeated attempts to bring in food and water, and to evacuate trapped civilians.
The Ukrainian embassy in Turkey said that a group of 86 Turkish nationals, including 34 children, were among the people who had sought safety in the mosque of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and his wife Roxolana.
Photo: AP
Elsewhere, air raid sirens rang out across the capital region and artillery barrages sent residents scurrying for shelter. Fighting erupted in multiple areas around Kyiv.
Russia’s slow, grinding apparent attempt to encircle the city and the bombardment of other population centers with artillery and airstrikes mirror tactics that Russian forces have previously used in other campaigns, notably in Syria and Chechnya, to crush armed resistance.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy yesterday said that Russia was sending new forces to Ukraine after suffering what he said were its biggest losses in decades.
Artillery pounded Kyiv’s northwestern outskirts. To the city’s southwest, two columns of smoke — one black and one white — rose in the town of Vaslkyiv after a strike on an ammunition depot. The strike on the depot caused hundreds of small explosions from detonating ammunition.
Ukraine’s emergency services yesterday reported that the bodies of five people — two women, a man and two children — were pulled from an apartment building that was struck by shelling in Kharkiv.
As of Friday, the death toll in Mariupol passed 1,500 during 12 days of attack, the mayor’s office said.
The bombardment forced crews to stop digging trenches for mass graves, so the “dead aren’t even being buried,” the mayor said.
Russian forces have hit at least two dozen hospitals and medical facilities since they invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, according to the WHO.
Ukrainian officials yesterday reported that heavy artillery damaged a cancer hospital and several residential buildings in Mykolaiv, a city 489km west of Mariupol.
The hospital’s head doctor, Maksim Beznosenko, said several hundred patients were in the facility during the attack, but no one was killed.
The invading Russian forces have struggled far more than expected against determined Ukrainian fighters.
However, Russia’s stronger military threatens to grind down the defending forces, despite an ongoing flow of weapons and other assistance from the West for Ukraine’s Westward-looking, democratically elected government.
The conflict has already sent 2.5 million people fleeing the country. Thousands of soldiers on both sides are believed to have been killed along with many Ukrainian civilians.
Zelenskiy appeared on video to encourage his people to keep fighting.
“It’s impossible to say how many days we will still need to free our land, but it is possible to say that we will do it,” he said from Kyiv.
Additional reporting by Reuters
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