Russia says the most limited war goal is to “liberate” Donbass in eastern Ukraine. The UN human rights office says 1,081 civilians have been killed in Ukraine since the invasion began. The city of Chernihiv is cut off, surrounded by Russian forces, says the governor. The United States is finalizing an agreement to help Europe ease its dependence on Russian oil and gas.
About 300 people were killed in a Russian airstrike last week at a Mariupol theater used as a shelter, Ukrainian authorities said on Friday, making it the deadliest known attack on civilians so far.
The bloodshed in the theater sparked allegations that Moscow was committing war crimes by killing civilians, either intentionally or indiscriminately.
For days, the government in the besieged and ruined port city was unable to count the victims of the March 16 bombing of the large, columns of the Mariupol theater, where hundreds of people are said to have been covered, the word “children” printed. in Russian with huge white letters on the ground outside to repel the air attack.
Announcing the death toll on its Telegram channel on Friday, the city government relied on eyewitnesses. But it was not immediately clear how the witnesses got to the number or whether emergency workers had completed the excavation.
Mariupol residents Lyubov Ostranitsa, 76, and Svetlana Mechetnaya, 60, seeking refuge in the basement of a damaged apartment building during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, sit on a bench in a courtyard on Friday. (Alexander Ermochenko / Reuters)
Mariupol was the scene of some of the worst disasters of the war. The eastern port was under siege from the first days of the invasion. Tens of thousands of people are believed to still be trapped inside without access to food, medicine, electricity or heat.
The Mariupol city government says the Kremlin’s main political party has opened a political office in a shopping mall on the outskirts of the besieged city. According to the post on the Telegram channel of the city, the office of United Russia distributes advertising material as well as mobile phone cards for an operator operating in the neighboring separatist areas supported by Russia.
Mariupol’s communication links have been almost severed since the siege began in early March. Mobile, TV and radio towers have been targeted in Russian airstrikes and artillery barracks.
Shifting goals
Meanwhile, in what could signal a significant narrowing of Moscow’s military targets, the United States has said that Russian forces appear to have stopped, at least for the time being, their ground offensive to occupy the capital, Kiev. , and focus more on the battles for control of the Donbas region in the southeast of the country – a change that the Kremlin seemed to confirm. The apparent shift in Moscow’s goals – after weeks in which Russian President Vladimir Putin denied Ukraine’s right to exist as a sovereign state and seemed determined to occupy many of its cities and overthrow its government – could suggest a possible exit strategy for Russia, which has suffered tougher resistance and heavier losses than expected. In fact, the Russians no longer have full control of Kherson, the first major city to fall to Moscow forces, a senior U.S. defense official has said. The official said the southern city was being challenged by Ukrainians in heavy fighting. The Kremlin has denied that it lost full control. CLOCKS Healthcare facilities damaged by Russian attacks:
Russian forces continue attacks on Ukrainian hospitals, health workers
Pavlo Kovtoniuk, co-founder of the Ukrainian Health Center, says 65 health care facilities have been damaged so far by Russian attacks. 8:45
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Friday it had confirmed 1,081 civilian deaths and 1,707 injuries in Ukraine since the Russian-led invasion began on February 24, with the death toll likely to be much higher.
UN human rights monitors are working to verify reports of additional deaths in areas of intense conflict in the Sumy, Kharkiv and Donetsk regions, where the city of Mariupol is located, the statement said.
Russia’s Interfax news agency quoted the Russian Defense Ministry as saying on Friday that 1,351 Russian soldiers had been killed and 825 wounded since the start of the operation, although it was not immediately clear if this included pro-Moscow militias. are fighting in the east or in others that do not belong to the Ministry of Defense, such as the National Guard.
Earlier this week, NATO estimated that 7,000 to 15,000 Russian soldiers had been killed in four weeks of fighting.
A rocket appears after a bombing in Kharkov on Thursday. Russian precision-guided missiles fail to hit targets in up to 60 percent of cases in Ukraine, three US officials with knowledge of the matter told Reuters. (Oleksandr Lapshyn / Reuters)
One month after the attack, Russian forces failed to capture any major Ukrainian cities, but instead bombed and surrounded them, driving almost a quarter of the country’s 44 million people out of their homes.
US President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said on Friday that the bombing of the theater was a “complete shock, especially given the fact that it was such a clear target of civilians.” He said it showed “a brazen contempt” for innocent lives.
“This is a barbaric war and according to international conventions, deliberate attacks on civilians are war crimes,” said Mircea Geoana, NATO’s deputy secretary general.
He said Putin’s efforts to break Ukraine’s will to resist had the opposite effect.
“What he is receiving in response is an even more determined Ukrainian army and an increasingly united West in support of Ukraine,” he said.
As the Russians continue to pound the capital from the air, they appear to have entered a “defensive crouch” outside Kyiv and are focusing more on Donbas, a senior U.S. defense official has said.
“They show no sign of being willing to go to Kyiv from the ground,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity, describing a US military internal assessment of the war.
The British Ministry of Defense said that Ukrainian forces had retaliated and were able to retake cities and defensive positions up to 35 km east of Kiev, as Russian troops retreated to their overcrowded supply lines. In the south, logistical problems and the Ukrainian resistance are slowing down the Russians as they try to drive west to the port of Odessa, the ministry said.
Residents of the area gather in the yard of an apartment building that was damaged by Russian attacks in the besieged southern port city of Mariupol on Friday. (Alexander Ermochenko / Reuters)
“Nothing remains” from Mariupol
For the civilians, the suffering is becoming more and more intense in the cities and towns of Ukraine, which are becoming more and more like the ruins left behind by the Russian forces in their campaigns in Syria and Chechnya.
In the village of Yasnohorodka, about 50 kilometers west of Kiev, Russian troops earlier in the week appeared to have been repulsed as part of a counterattack by Ukrainian forces.
The tower of the village church was damaged by an explosion and the houses at the main crossroads were in ruins. Loud explosions and bursts of gunfire were heard.
“You can see for yourself what happened here. People were killed here. Our soldiers were killed here. There were battles,” said Yasnohorodka resident Valeriy Puzakov.
Tens of thousands of people fled Mariupol last week, most of them in private cars through dozens of Russian checkpoints.
“Unfortunately, there is nothing left of Mariupol,” said Evgeni Sokirko, who was among those waiting for an evacuation train in Zaporizhia, the nearest urban center in Mariupol, and a refugee stop.
“In the last week, there have been explosions like I have never heard before.”
A member of Ukraine’s territorial defense unit prepares to go to the front line in Yasnogorodk, on the outskirts of Kiev, on Friday. (Rodrigo Abd / The Associated Press)
Oksana Abramova, 42, said she felt sorry for those left behind in the city who had been cut off from the bombing of mobile, radio and television towers and had no means of escape.
“I think all the time how they are, where they are. Are they still hiding, are they alive? Or maybe they are not there anymore,” he said.
In Kyiv, the ashes of the dead are piling up in the capital’s central crematorium because so many relatives have left, leaving the containers unclaimed. And the northern city of Chernihiv is completely cut off.
Chernihiv lost its main road bridge over the Desna River in a Russian airstrike this week. The bombings then destroyed a footbridge, trapping the remaining residents in the city without electricity, water or heating, authorities said. More than half of Chernihiv’s pre-war population of 285,000 is believed to have fled.
CLOCKS A resident of Lviv calls on NATO to take action:
“People can stop this,” said a resident of Ukraine
Saying “ashamed that people tolerate this”, Lviv resident and journalist Alya Shandra called on NATO to stop fearing confronting Russia and take more action to support Ukraine. 6:28
Elsewhere, Russian forces fired two missiles late Thursday at a Ukrainian military unit on the outskirts of Dnipro, the country’s fourth-largest city, regional emergency services said. The strikes destroyed buildings and sparked two fires, he said. The number of dead and injured was unclear.
The Russian military claimed on Friday that it had destroyed a huge Ukrainian fuel depot used to power the defense of the Kiev region, with ships launching cruise missiles, according to the Interfax news agency. Videos on social media showed a huge fireball explosion near the capital.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on his country to continue …
