LVIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said early Sunday that the siege of the port city of Mariupol will go down in history as a war crime committed by Russian forces.
“What they did to a peaceful city was the act of an occupying force, an act of terror that will be remembered for centuries to come,” Zelensky said in a video address to the nation.
Russian troops have advanced deeper into the besieged and destroyed city, where heavy fighting has shut down a major steel factory and prompted local authorities to call for more aid from Western countries.
At least 20 babies, carried by Ukrainian surrogate mothers, are holed up in makeshift bomb shelters in the capital, Kiev, waiting for their parents to come to the battlefield to pick them up. Some are just a few days old, cared for by nurses trapped in the shelters by incessant Russian artillery fire as they try to surround the city.
The fall of Mariupol, one of the war’s hardest hit areas, would mark a major battlefield advance for Russian forces, who are stuck outside major cities more than three weeks into Europe’s biggest ground invasion since World War Two.
“Children and old people are dying. The city has been destroyed, wiped off the face of the earth,” Mariupol police officer Mikhail Vershunin said in a video addressed to Western leaders from a rubble-strewn street and seen by The Associated Press.
Details also began to emerge Saturday about a rocket attack the previous day that killed up to 40 Marines in the southern city of Mykolayiv, according to a Ukrainian military official who spoke to The New York Times.
Russian forces have already cut off Mariupol from the Sea of Azov, and its fall would link Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, with eastern territory controlled by Moscow-backed separatists. It would be a rare breakthrough in the face of fierce Ukrainian resistance that has dashed Russian hopes of a quick victory and galvanized the West.
Vadym Denisenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, said fighting had taken place between Ukrainian and Russian forces over the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol. “One of the largest steel plants in Europe has actually been destroyed,” Denisenko said in a television interview.
Mariupol city council said hours later that Russian forces had forcibly relocated thousands of the city’s residents, mostly women and children, to Russia, without saying where they were being relocated, a claim that could not immediately be confirmed by The Associated Press.
Oleksiy Arestevich, an adviser to President Zelensky, said the forces closest to helping Mariupol were already fighting “overwhelming enemy forces” and that “there is no military solution for Mariupol at the moment.”
Despite the siege of Mariupol, many remain astonished at Ukraine’s ability to hold off a much larger and better armed enemy. The UK Ministry of Defence has said that Ukrainian airspace remains effectively defended.
“At the start of the conflict, gaining air superiority was one of Russia’s main objectives, but Russia’s failure to achieve this has significantly slowed down the progress of the operation,” the Defense Ministry said on Twitter.
The Russian Defense Ministry said it now relies on stand-off weapons launched from the relative safety of Russian airspace to strike targets inside Ukraine.
In Mykolaiv, rescuers searched the rubble of a Marine barracks believed to have been destroyed in a missile attack on Friday. The region’s governor said the Marines were asleep when the attack happened.
It was unclear how many Marines were inside at the time, and rescuers continued to search the rubble for survivors the next day, but a senior Ukrainian military official, who spoke to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity to disclose classified information, estimated that as many as 40 Marines were killed, making it one of the deadliest attacks against Ukrainian forces during the war.
Estimates of Russian deaths vary widely, but even conservative figures put them at less than a few thousand: Russia suffered 64 deaths in five days of fighting in its 2008 war with Georgia, lost about 15,000 in Afghanistan over a decade, and more than 11,000 in several years of fighting in Chechnya.
Russian military casualties in Ukraine are approaching the 10 percent threshold that indicates a decline in combat capability, said Dmitry Gorenberg, a Russian security expert at the Virginia-based think tank CNA. Four of an estimated 20 Russian officers who took part in the fighting have reportedly been killed on the battlefield, indicating a decline in leadership, Gorenberg said.
To maintain long-term control over Ukraine while countering insurgency, Russia would need 800,000 troops – roughly the entire active military force – said Michael Clarke, former director of the Royal Institute for Integrated Security Studies, a UK-based defence think tank.
“Unless Russia is planning a total genocide – meaning they destroy all the major cities and Ukrainians rise up in resistance to the Russian occupation – we’re just going to have a constant guerilla war,” Clark said.
The Russian military announced the first combat use of its latest hypersonic missile on Saturday. Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said a Kinzhal missile destroyed an underground warehouse storing missiles and aviation munitions in the western Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine.
Russia says the Kinzhal, fitted to MiG-31 fighter jets, has a range of up to 2,000 kilometers (about 1,250 miles) and travels at 10 times the speed of sound.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the US could not confirm the use of hypersonic missiles.
UN agencies have confirmed that more than 847 civilians have been killed since the war began, but acknowledge the actual death toll is probably much higher. The UN says more than 3.3 million people have fled Ukraine as refugees.
Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk said evacuations from Mariupol and other besieged cities were proceeding along eight of 10 humanitarian corridors, with a total of 6,623 people evacuated.
Vereshchuk said plans for humanitarian aid to the southern city of Kherson, which Russia seized early in the war, could not be delivered because trucks were stopped on the way by Russian troops.
Ukraine and Russia have held several rounds of negotiations to try to end the conflict but remain at odds on several issues, with Moscow pushing for its neighbour to be demilitarised and Kiev demanding security guarantees.
Across Ukraine, hospitals, schools and buildings where people had sought safety were attacked.
At least 130 people survived Wednesday’s bombing at a Mariupol theater that was being used as a shelter, but another 1,300 were believed to still be inside, Ukrainian parliament’s human rights commissioner Ludmila Denisova said Friday.
“We pray that they are all alive, but so far we have no information about them,” Denisova told Ukrainian television.
Satellite imagery released Saturday by Maxar Technologies confirmed earlier reports that much of the theater had been destroyed, and also showed the word “Children” written in Russian in large white letters on the outside of the building.
Ukrainian national police said on Saturday that Russian forces had shelled eight cities and villages in the eastern Donetsk region, including Mariupol, in the past 24 hours, killing or wounding dozens of civilians and damaging at least 37 homes and facilities, including schools, museums and shopping centers.
In the western city of Lviv, Ukraine’s cultural capital hit by a Russian missile attack on Friday, veterans were training dozens of civilians how to handle firearms and grenades.
“It’s difficult because my hands are really weak, but I can do it,” said Katarina Ishchenko, 22, one of the trainees.
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Associated Press writer Yuras Kalmanov in Lviv, Ukraine, and AP reporters around the world contributed to this report.
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Follow AP’s war coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
