According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, “hundreds” of people were still Friday under the rubble of a theater bombed by Russian forces in Mariupol.
“Hundreds” of people were still under the rubble of a theater bombarded by Russian forces in Mariupol, in southeastern Ukraine, on Friday, according to the Ukrainian president, and Russian missiles hit the outskirts of Lviv, the big city hitherto spared from the west of the country.
As Westerners try to further ramp up pressure on Russia to end the war, US President Joe Biden has had a phone call with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping to warn him against any assistance to Moscow.
Two days after the bombing of a theater in Mariupol, Volodymyr Zelensky announced that “more than 130 people could be saved. But hundreds of residents of Mariupol are still under the rubble”, he added in a video, even though the Russian army has announced that it is now fighting in the city center of this port on the Sea of Azov, which has been besieged for days.
Mr. Zelensky has promised the continuation of relief operations “despite the bombardments” which continue in this city.
Before after : Images of Mariupol devastated by the bombardments
The Russian army said on Friday that it had succeeded in entering the city and fighting there, alongside troops from the separatist “republic” of Donetsk. These troops “tighten their vice of encirclement and fight the nationalists in the center of the city”, affirmed in Moscow the spokesman of the Russian Ministry of Defense, Igor Konashenkov.
The capture of Mariupol would be an important turning point in the conflict and would allow Russia to ensure territorial continuity between its forces from annexed Crimea and the troops from Donbass.
The Ukrainian authorities had accused Wednesday the Russian air force of having “knowingly” bombed a theater in Mariupol where hundreds of inhabitants were refugees, which Russia denied.
The town hall of Mariupol reported that the situation was “critical” in the city with “uninterrupted” Russian bombardments and “colossal” destruction. According to initial estimates, around 80% of the city’s housing stock was destroyed.
To read :Attack in Mariupol: the photo of a pregnant woman at the heart of disinformation
“We did not take shelter, because we are not afraid of anything”
Near Lviv, hundreds of kilometers to the west, “missiles hit the airport district”, wrote on his Facebook account Andriy Sadovy, the mayor of this large city located near the Polish border, until there spared from the fighting.
He assured that the strike did not directly hit the airport facilities but an aircraft repair factory, without causing any casualties.
“It’s a strike on the city of Lviv, a humanitarian hub where there are more than 200,000 displaced people” and it shows “that they are fighting not against soldiers but against the population”, affirmed Maksym Kozytsky, the governor Lviv regional office, reporting one minor injury.
An AFP reporter saw a plume of smoke rising into the air above the area.
“We heard the alarm. We were warned but (…) we did not take shelter because we are not afraid of anything,” said Olga, 56. “At night, we pray for all our cities under Putin’s vicious attack.”
During his nearly two-hour meeting with Joe Biden on Friday, the Chinese president assured that China and the United States have a responsibility to help achieve world peace.
A conflict “is not in anyone’s interest”, he said, according to Chinese television. “The Ukrainian crisis is not something we wanted to see” happen, he added.
The tone was set Thursday by Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
“President Biden (…) will make it clear to him that China will bear responsibility for any act aimed at supporting Russian aggression and that we will not hesitate to impose costs on him”.
At least 500 people killed in Kharkiv
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion on February 24, the Chinese communist regime, sharing with Russia a deep hostility towards the United States, has refrained from urging Russian President Vladimir Putin to withdraw his troops from Ukraine.
But China may have already begun to distance itself from Moscow because, according to diplomats at the UN, Russia on Thursday night gave up on holding a Security Council vote the next day on a war-related resolution. in Ukraine, for lack of support from its closest allies.
Mr Biden didn’t mince words about Mr Putin, calling him a “thug” and a “bloody dictator” after calling him a “war criminal” the day before.
The Ukrainian president once again implored Westerners on Thursday to help “stop this war”, when Russian strikes killed at least 27 people in the east of the country.
“A people is being destroyed in Europe,” he said, applauded by the deputies of the German Bundestag to whom he addressed by videoconference.
In addition to Mariupol, the bombardments also continue in kyiv and Kharkiv, the country’s second largest city, in the northeast, where at least 500 people have been killed since the start of the war.
According to the Ukrainian emergency service, Russian gunfire hit “a higher education institution” and “two neighboring apartment buildings”, killing one and injuring 11 in Kharkiv on Friday.
The capital has been emptied of at least half of its 3.5 million inhabitants. According to the town hall, 222 people, including 60 civilians, have been killed in kyiv since the start of the invasion.
In the suburb of Zaporozhye (southeast), Moscow said it had fired two short-range ballistic missiles at Ukrainian positions from which missiles were fired in the direction of Melitopol (south), invested by Russian forces.
More than 3.2 million Ukrainians took the roads of exile
No precise global assessment was provided even if President Zelensky mentioned on March 12 the death of “about 1300” Ukrainian soldiers, while Moscow only reported nearly 500 dead in its ranks on March 2.
According to the count as of March 16 of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Ukraine consulted by AFP, stressing that its figures are probably much lower than the reality, at least 780 civilians – including 58 children- have been killed in Ukraine and more than 1250 injured.
Three weeks after the start of the invasion, Moscow shows no sign of respite in its offensive and accuses kyiv of “dragging” the talks between the belligerents.
The Russian president is due to speak with his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, around 4 p.m. GMT on Friday, according to the Kremlin.
Russia has indicated that it wants to negotiate with kyiv a neutral and demilitarized status. The Ukrainian authorities, without brushing aside the idea of neutrality and seeming to renounce NATO membership, have called for the designation of countries to guarantee its security and which would defend it militarily in the event of aggression by Moscow. .
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told Russia Today that Moscow “is not closing the door to the West”, while denouncing an “attempt” by Washington to create a “unipolar world”. Mr. Blinken, for his part, estimated on Thursday that Russia had not so far demonstrated “significant effort” to find a way out of the crisis.
More than 3.2 million Ukrainians have taken the road to exile, nearly two-thirds of them to Poland, sometimes only a stage before continuing their exodus.
Ukraine’s humanitarian needs are ‘increasingly urgent’, with more than 200,000 people without water in the Donetsk region alone and ‘serious shortages’ of food, water and medicine in towns such as Mariupol or Sumy, UNHCR spokesman Matthew Saltmarsh said on Friday.
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