DNIPRO, Ukraine — As Russia sharply rejected President Joe Biden’s description of its wartime acts as “genocide,” Moscow on Wednesday asserted it had captured more than 1,000 Ukrainian troops in Mariupol, dealing what would be a heavy blow to defenders’ desperate efforts to hold the strategic southern port city.
The Russian defense ministry’s claim of a mass surrender by hundreds of Ukrainian troops could not be verified, and Ukraine said the battle for Mariupol continued.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, meanwhile, fired back after Biden said Tuesday for the first time that Russia was committing genocide in Ukraine, telling reporters the remark was “hardly acceptable from a president of the United States, a country that has committed well-known crimes in recent times.”
