Russian forces are now inside the besieged southern city of Mariupol, a senior US defence official said. Two “super-powerful bombs” rocked Mariupol on Tuesday even as rescue efforts were ongoing, local authorities said. More than 200,000 people are trapped in the city, where the situation has been described as a “freezing hellscape riddled with dead bodies and destroyed buildings”, Human Rights Watch said.
About 300,000 people in the occupied southern city of Kherson were running out of food and medical supplies, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s foreign ministry said. The city of Kherson was the first major Ukrainian city to fall into the hands of Russian troops after they invaded Ukraine on 24 February.
Russian forces have “kidnapped” 2,389 children from the Russian-controlled territories of Luhansk and Donetsk, the US embassy in Kyiv said today, citing figures by Ukraine’s foreign ministry. The embassy said: “This is not assistance. It is kidnapping.”
At least one person has died after drones attacked a scientific institute in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, AFP reports. Rescuers were seen removing a body from the scene, as smoke rose from the seven-storey building at the Institute for Superhard Materials in north-west Kyiv, part of the National Academy of Science of Ukraine.
The Ukrainian health minister, Viktor Lyashko, said 10 hospitals had been completely destroyed since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February. Other hospitals could not be restocked with medicines and supplies because of nearby fighting, the minister added.
A Ukrainian journalist, Victoria Roshchyna, has been released from captivity by Russian forces, the Ukrainian outlet Hromadske said. There is, however, growing concern about a well-known photojournalist, Maksym Levin, who was last reported to be on the frontline near Kyiv, but nobody has had any contact with him since 13 March.
Russia plans to unleash a “great terror” on the southern occupied city of Kherson by kidnapping residents and taking them across the Russian border, an FSB whistleblower has said. The Kremlin was no longer willing to “play nicely” with protesters in the Ukrainian city, a letter said.
A Russian court has sentenced jailed the Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny for nine years after convicting him of fraud and contempt of court. Navalny is already serving a two-and-a-half-year sentence at a prison camp east of Moscow for parole violations related to charges he says were trumped up.
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, has described the war in Ukraine as “unwinnable”. Speaking to reporters today, Guterres said Ukrainians are enduring a “living hell” and the reverberations of the war are being felt worldwide.
The Ukrainian military has claimed Russian forces have stockpiles of ammunition and food that will last for “no more than three days”. A UK official said the Ukrainian military claim “sounds entirely plausible”.
The wife of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has thanked France’s first lady and other leaders’ wives for helping to ensure sick children reached safety. Writing to Le Parisien newspaper, Olena Zelenska paid tribute to Europeans who have been housing and helping Ukrainian refugees, saying they deserved a Nobel peace prize.
A journalist at Russia’s Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper has said that a story that appeared on its website on Monday claiming nearly 10,000 Russian troops had been killed in Ukraine so far was the result of a “hack” on the website.
