Russian artillery has unleashed a continuous bombardment on the port of Mariupol, reducing the besieged city to “ashes of a dead land”, Ukrainian officials said, as survivors described their escape past bodies piled up in the streets.
The Donetsk governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko, accused Vladimir Putin’s forces of indiscriminate fire on civilian areas, as local officials said two “super-powerful bombs” had struck amid efforts to rescue the remaining 100,000-200,000 civilians hiding in basements and shelters.
In his daily address, Zelenskiy said bus drivers and emergency service personnel on one convoy seeking to rescue people from Mariupol had been take prisoner on Tuesday. “We are doing everything we can to free out people and unblock the movement of humanitarian aid”, he said.
Zelenskiy described the scenes in the city as inhumane. “No food, no water, no medicine,” he said. “Under constant shelling, under constant bombing.” Ukraine’s president said he had spoken to Pope Francis who he had invited to the country on a mercy mission that he believed was possible to organise.
A group of 780 terrified and traumatised men, women and children arrived in Lviv by rail on Tuesday afternoon with horrific stories of the devastation. Most were immediately put on coaches to Poland with food rations.
One, Yulia Krytska, 42, said she would stay in Ukraine – but could never return home. “I want the world to know about Mariupol,” said Krytska who, with her husband and 12-year-old son, survived for days on shared scraps of food and dirty drinking water in the basement of a multi-storey building.
As she spoke, a public address system in Lviv central station announced: “Dear citizens of Mariupol – welcome to Lviv, you are safe now.”
Hands trembling uncontrollably, and with tears in her eyes, Krytska spoke of the rotting corpses and endless shelling that had left “people without any hope of surviving”.
“We got out by accident,” she said. “A volunteer shouted into the basement of the multi-storey building where we were hiding that there was a way out. His name is Maxim, that is all I know. People don’t have any food there. They have nothing. What we had we shared. They are dead people in the streets everywhere. They can’t take them away because of the shelling”.
Krytska said that the Ukrainian police and army seemed to disappear once the bombing started, with only brief lulls of 30 minutes between hours of devastating blows that flattened every building. “It just kept coming,” she said. “As the bombs were dropping, we didn’t know where they were coming from.
“It was unusually cold for Mariupol at this time of year and we were sharing whatever we had to keep warm in the basement. My son is traumatised. I want to stay here – but I don’t want to go home.”
On Tuesday, a further convoy of 15 buses carrying 1,114 evacuees set off on a tense escape through the same route as Krytska through territory occupied by Russian forces to arrive at the city of Zaporizhzhia. Later, the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russian forces had seized one of the humanitarian convoys near Mangush. “Employees of the State Emergency Service and bus drivers have been taken captive. We are doing everything to set our people free,” he said.
US and Ukrainian officials described bitter fighting in and around the city, as well as naval shelling by ships in the Sea of Azov. “It is clear that the occupiers are not interested in the city of Mariupol, they want to raze it to the ground, to reduce it to ashes of a dead land,” a local official said.
From Zaporizhzhia, the evacuees faced a further 24-hour rail journey in packed trains to the relative safety of Lviv. “We didn’t care if we had to stand for 24 hours – we just wanted to be safe”, Krytska said.
In a video address to the Italian parliament Zelenskiy said of Mariupol: “There is nothing left there. Only ruins.”
On a Telegram news feed used to share stories of Mariupol’s destruction, a picture of a note and scrawled map that had been left by a father for an absent son was posted. It said: “Dima, your mother died on 9 March 2022. She died quickly. The building burned down. Dima, I’m sorry I couldn’t save her. I buried your mother near the kindergarten. I love you.” The message could not be independently verified.
Meanwhile a Ukrainian official claimed that Russian forces had used phosphorous in the city of Kramatorsk in Donetsk. Oleksiy Biloshitsky, first deputy head of the National Police of Kyiv, said in a post on Facebook on Tuesday: “Another use of phosphorus munitions in Kramatorsk. Prohibitions and conventions are for the civilized world.” The claim could not be verified.
White phosphorus is routinely held by militaries around the world and is used legally in combat as a smokescreen in daytime and as an incendiary to light up an area at night. But it is illegal to use it against civilians because it causes serious and exceptionally painful burns on contact with skin.
Amid growing international condemnation, Greece’s foreign minister, Nikos Dendias, said Greece would seek to lead a humanitarian aid mission to the city with the help of the Red Cross.
The development came as the US accused Russia of kidnapping 2,389 Ukrainian children from the separatist regions of Ukraine. The “illegally removed” children were said to have been taken from the Russian-controlled territories of Luhansk and Donetsk to Russia under the guise of a Kremlin-directed rescue mission.
Moscow’s claims of a humanitarian effort were ridiculed in Ukraine and abroad as gruesome witness testimony from besieged Ukrainian cities emerged from the survivors.
Iryna Venediktova, Ukraine’s prosecutor general, described the alleged kidnapping of children as a “gross violation of international law”.
The US embassy in Kyiv tweeted: “This is not assistance. It is kidnapping.”
Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Iryna Vereshchuk said a convoy of 21 vehicles carrying humanitarian aid had been sent ahead to Zaporizhzhia, where evacuees from Mariupol were being initially bussed, with flour, food and medical supplies and that they would not leave anyone behind.
Nearly 200 more people from Mariupol are expected to arrive in Lviv on Wednesday.
Vereshchuk said: “We understand that there will not be enough seats for everyone, so please come to the buses in an organised manner, according to the instructions of our representatives in place. We will not leave anyone and we will continue to evacuate daily according to the same algorithm until we take everyone out.”
Ukraine’s government defied an ultimatum by the Russian military for its forces in Mariupol to “lay down arms” by 5am Moscow time (2am GMT) on Monday.
The city council in Mariupol has said that Russian forces had “destroyed almost 80% of the city’s infrastructure in 22 days, of which 30% can no longer be rebuilt”. The fate of those inside an art school flattened on Sunday and a theatre targeted four days earlier remains unclear.
“Mariupol residents are in terrible conditions and are overcoming new challenges every day,” the city council said.
Lyudmila Denisova, Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, said Russian forces had fired on Monday’s evacuation buses from Mariupol and that four children had been taken to hospital.
As of 8am BST on Tuesday, 117 children had died in the war and more than 155 children had been injured, she said. “It is impossible to establish the actual number of dead and wounded children due to the fact that the occupying forces are actively fighting in Ukrainian cities,” Denisova added.
“In the Kharkiv region, a Russian tank shot down a car with a family of two children. The family shouted that they were civilians, waving a white flag, but in vain. Parents and a nine-year-old girl were killed and a 17-year-old boy was injured.
“As a result of attack of the village of Konstantinovka of the Nikolaev area houses were destroyed, under their blockages the burnt bodies of three people, among which the seven-year-old child are found. On 21 March the occupiers fired on evacuation buses with children from Mariupol. Four children were taken to hospital.”
The Russian government denies shelling civilians.
Moscow sees Mariupol as key to securing a corridor between the Russian-controlled territories in Donbas and illegally annexed Crimea. It is also home to the largest trading port in the Azov Sea from which Ukraine exports grain, iron and steel, and heavy machinery.
A Ukrainian MP, Anton Gerashchenko, said that the siege of the city was being led by Col Gen Mikhail Mizintsev, a favourite of Vladimir Putin, and who was said to be responsible for Russian operations in Syria.
