Over 2,100 Mariupol residents killed since invasion began: official
KYIV, Ukraine — More than 2,100 residents of Ukraine's besieged port city of Mariupol have been killed since hostilities began, the local authorities said Sunday.
"As of today, 2,187 Mariupol residents have died from attacks by Russia," the city council posted on Telegram.
It said around 100 aerial bombs have been dropped on the city. The bombing of a maternity and children's hospital wounded 17 on Wednesday and prompted international condemnation.
The Azov Sea port city of around half a million has been under siege since early this month and is facing what Ukraine and aid agencies call a "humanitarian catastrophe", lacking water or heating and running out of food.
"People are in a serious situation for 12 days. There is no electricity, water, or heat in the city, there is almost no mobile communication, and the last supplies of food and water are running out," the local authorities warned.
The authorities said Wednesday that 1,207 civilians had died in the first nine days of the siege of the strategic city. They say around 400,000 people are still trapped in the city.
A convoy of aid headed for Mariupol was blocked at a Russian checkpoint on Saturday, with hopes that it would arrive Sunday.
Turkey has asked Russia to help evacuate its citizens stranded in Mariupol, Ankara's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Sunday.
President Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday secured Turkey's crucial backing for Ukraine's NATO aspirations after winning a US pledge for cluster munitions that could inflict massive damage on Russian forces on the battlefield.
Washington's decision to deliver the controversial weapons — banned across a large part of the world but not in Russia or Ukraine — dramatically ups the stakes in the war, which entered its 500th day Saturday.
Zelensky has been travelling across Europe trying to secure bigger and better weapons for his outmatched army, which has launched a long-awaited counteroffensive that is progressing less swiftly than Ukraine's allies had hoped. — AFP
Washington's decision to supply Ukraine with ATACMS long-range missiles is "a grave mistake", Russian ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov says Wednesday.
"The White House's decision to send long-range missiles to Ukrainians is a grave mistake. The consequences of this step, which was deliberately hidden from the public, will be of the most serious nature," he says in a statement. — AFP
President Vladimir Putin says Sunday that Russian forces had made gains in their Ukraine offensive including in Avdiivka, a symbolic industrial hub.
"Our troops are improving their position in almost all of this area, which is quite vast," he says in an interview on Russian television, an extract of which was posted on social media on Sunday. "This concerns the areas of Kupiansk, Zaporizhia and Avdiivka." — AFP
The regional governor says debris from a drone destroyed over the Russian region of Belgorod, which borders Ukraine, fell on homes and killed three people, including a young child.
The air defense system "shot down an aircraft-type UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) approaching the city", says Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov, adding that the falling debris destroyed several homes.
"Most importantly, three people were killed, one of them a small child," he writes on the Telegram messaging app, accompanied by pictures of a house reduced to a pile of rubble behind red and white police tape. — AFP
Ukraine's air force says on Tuesday that it had destroyed 27 of 36 Russian attack drones overnight in the south of the country.
Ukrainian forces downed 27 "Shahed-136/131" drones in the southern Kherson, Mykolaiv and Odesa regions, the air force said on the messaging platform Telegram.
In all, Moscow had launched 36 of the Iranian-made drones from the Crimean peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014, it says. — AFP
The Kremlin claims on Friday Russian forces never targeted civilian infrastructure after Ukraine blamed Moscow for a missile attack that killed over 50 people in the eastern village of Groza.
"We repeat that the Russian military does not strike civilian targets. Strikes are carried out on military targets, on places where military personnel are concentrated," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says in his daily briefing. — AFP
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