Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russia’s siege of the port city of Mariupol was “a terror that will be remembered for centuries to come,” while local authorities said thousands of residents there had been taken by force across the border.
“Over the past week, several thousand Mariupol residents were deported onto the Russian territory,” the city council said in a statement on its Telegram channel late on Saturday.
Russian news agencies have said buses have carried several hundred people Moscow calls refugees from Mariupol to Russia in the past few days.
Photo: AFP
The council also said that Russian forces had on Saturday bombed a Mariupol art school in which 400 residents had taken shelter, but the number of casualties was not yet known.
Reuters could not independently verify the claims.
Many of Mariupol’s 400,000 residents have been trapped for more than two weeks as Russia seeks to take control of the city, which would help secure a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula that Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
Photo: Reuters
The Mariupol bombardment has left buildings in rubble and severed central supplies of electricity, heating and water, local authorities said.
Rescue workers were still searching for survivors in a Mariupol theater that local authorities said was flattened by Russian air strikes on Wednesday.
Russia denies hitting the theater.
Zelenskiy said the siege of Mariupol was a war crime.
“To do this to a peaceful city ... is a terror that will be remembered for centuries to come,” he said in a late night broadcast.
Still, he said that peace talks with Russia were needed although they were “not easy and pleasant.”
Air raid sirens sounded across Ukrainian cities yesterday and the Russian Ministry of Defense said that cruise missiles were launched from ships in the Black Sea and Caspian Sea, as well as hypersonic missiles from Crimean airspace.
The UN human rights office said at least 847 civilians had been killed in Ukraine as of Friday, although it says the real toll is thought to be considerably higher since its monitoring team has not yet been able to verify casualty reports from several badly hit cities.
The Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office said that 112 children have been killed.
Russian forces have also taken heavy losses since the start of the invasion, and long columns of troops that bore down on the capital, Kyiv, have been halted in the suburbs.
Ukraine’s military yesterday said Moscow’s combat losses included 14,700 personnel and 476 tanks.
Russia last acknowledged on March 2 that nearly 500 of its soldiers had been killed.
Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Mevlut Cavusoglu said Russia and Ukraine were getting closer to an agreement on “critical” issues and have nearly agreed on some subjects.
Cavusoglu said he was hopeful for a ceasefire if the sides do not take a step back from the progress they have made toward an agreement.
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