Russia Ramps Up Ukraine Attacks in Effort to Seize Strategically Key Port City

“It’s a total lie,” Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko stated in response to Mr. Lavrov’s assertion. “Everything that was said, each word, was absolutely not true.”

Ukrainian authorities raised the casualty rely of Wednesday’s hospital bombing to three lifeless and 17 wounded. U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, throughout a visit to Poland on Thursday, known as for a warfare crimes investigation, including that Russia was committing atrocities in Ukraine.

Russia has been accused before of targeting hospitals. Physicians for Human Rights corroborated 492 assaults on healthcare services in Syria and 847 deaths of medical personnel there between March 2011 and December 2017 that have been attributable to Russian and Syrian forces. Other teams, together with Doctors Without Borders, had comparable findings. Russia at one level known as such accusations “figments of the imagination.”

For the Kremlin, Mariupol is a key goal. Capturing the strategically necessary port metropolis would open a land hall from the Russian border alongside Ukraine’s southern coast to Crimea, which Moscow annexed in 2014, and release Russian forces to transfer on Kyiv. Russia started bombarding the town on the first day of its invasion, and its floor forces have attacked from the east and west.

Ukraine’s authorities resumed efforts to evacuate civilians Thursday from a handful of cities the place Ukrainian and Russian forces have agreed to a tentative cease-fire. While comparable efforts have failed due to preventing, the Ukrainian authorities stated 60,000 civilians have escaped by way of agreed-upon corridors because the first have been organized earlier this week.

Attempts to evacuate individuals from Mariupol on the Azov Sea have failed repeatedly. Its siege and bombardment is turning into a cautionary story for what may occur to different Ukrainian cities as Russia presses its invasion.

The metropolis is now surrounded by Russian troops, a few of whom have reached its outskirts, in accordance to native authorities. The Ukrainian defenses have taken extreme losses, however have been ready to repel the assaults, Mariupol’s Deputy Mayor Serhiy Orlov stated.

The metropolis is guarded by a pressure consisting of Ukraine’s coast and border guard in addition to an area militia that was fashioned by volunteers in response to Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine.

The militia started as a ragtag unit that was later formally admitted into the common armed forces of Ukraine as a part of the National Guard. It has since change into one of many best-equipped and best-trained navy models, hardened over eight years of warfare in the realm that joins Ukraine-controlled territory from the Russian-occupied zone.

Oleg Zhdanov, a reserve colonel in the Ukrainian military and a navy analyst, stated Mariupol’s defenders embody models with ample expertise preventing Russian-led troops in Ukraine’s east. He stated they’ve inflicted heavy losses in the previous two weeks on Russian attackers, who he stated had been mounting pricey frontal assaults.

But the every day Russian bombardment has left the town of greater than 400,000 with out meals, clear water or electrical energy. Video footage of components of Mariupol have begun to resemble cities flattened by Russia in different conflicts, similar to Grozny in Chechnya and Idlib in Syria.

Andzela Timchenko, a grandmother of 4 young children, stated by phone Thursday that she and her household have been taking refuge in a basement of their house, melting snow for consuming water. But she stated even the snow had run out, and she or he apprehensive that her grandchildren might quickly endure from dehydration. She stated native authorities offered small rations of Pepsi-Cola and cereals on Wednesday, in addition to pellets to make fireplace to heat up and prepare dinner meals.

Her household had been woke up by the roar of warplanes at 3 a.m. Thursday, adopted by a barrage of explosions that brought about the earth to shake beneath them, she stated.

“They are bombing everything, the streets are full of dead people,” she stated.

Father Serhi Gorobtsov, an orthodox priest, stated the air raid Thursday was extra intense than others earlier than it. “Tall buildings are collapsing like dominoes,” Mr. Gorobtsov posted on his

Facebook

web page on Thursday.

At the bombed hospital web site, Mariupol’s deputy mayor stated different, uncounted our bodies couldn’t be recovered due to intense shelling, and that 47 have been buried in a typical grave on Wednesday. The hospital was the second to be hit after a serious clinic with 600 beds was focused earlier in the week. A blood financial institution was additionally bombed, Mr. Orlov stated.

Mr. Lavrov, the Russian overseas minister, Thursday denied any intentional bombing of civilian targets. His assembly with Ukrainian Foreign Minister

Dmytro Kuleba

in Antalya, Turkey, lasted 90 minutes. No progress was made on a cease-fire settlement, Mr. Kuleba stated.

In a press convention after the assembly, Mr. Lavrov blamed biased western media for reporting the alleged atrocities and shrugged off worries about Western economic sanctions which have begun to sever Russia’s ties with the U.S. and Europe.

Russia, he stated, would retool its financial system to be extra impartial, a transfer that was “long overdue.”

U.S. officers say that Moscow, having failed to swiftly take control of Ukraine after it launched its invasion two weeks in the past, is probably going to strive advancing with growing disregard for civilian casualties.

Western analysts say that growing civilian casualties are inevitable because the preventing in Ukraine strikes into its main cities. Ukrainian forces, unable to match the Russians in manpower or weaponry, have proven a desire to falling again to city areas, the place fierce preventing is anticipated.

—Jared Malsin, James Marson, Max Colchester and Drew Hinshaw contributed to this text.

Corrections & Amplifications
Volodymyr Zelensky

is the president of Ukraine. An earlier model of this text misspelled his identify as Voldymyr Zelenksy. (Corrected on March 10)

Write to Alan Cullison at [email protected], Brett Forrest at [email protected] and Bojan Pancevski at [email protected]