Ukraine has said it will never bow to ultimatums to surrender its cities, including devastated Mariupol, as authorities in Odesa accused Russian forces of striking residential areas in their first attack on the vital Black Sea port.
After his government rejected out of hand a 5am Monday deadline to cease fighting for Mariupol, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said the country would no more give up the besieged southern city than it would Kyiv or Kharkiv.
“We have an ultimatum with points in it – ‘Follow it, and then we will end the war,’” Zelenskiy said in an interview with a Ukrainian broadcaster. “Ukraine cannot fulfil that ultimatum.” The country would never accept Russian occupation, he said.
Zelenskiy also said that any peace settlement with Russia would have to be submitted to a referendum in Ukraine. “The people will have to weigh in on certain kinds of compromise,” Zelensky told Suspilne, an internet news site.
Odesa authorities said on Monday that airstrikes had hit apartment blocks in the city’s outskirts, causing no casualties but starting a fire. Overnight shelling in the capital, Kyiv, reduced a large shopping mall to rubble and killed at least eight people.
Ukraine on Monday also turned down an offer from Moscow’s military to open two humanitarian corridors out of Mariupol, one leading eastwards into Russia and the other north to Ukrainian-held territory, in exchange for capitulation.
Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Iryna Vereshchuk said there could be “no question of any surrender, laying down of arms” in the stricken city, another key port, although she added the situation there was “very difficult”.
Ukraine’s defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, said the “superhuman courage” of Mariupol’s defenders was helping to save “tens of thousands of lives” in other cities such as Kyiv, Dnipro and Odesa.
Hundreds of thousands of increasingly desperate people have been trapped in Mariupol, many without water, heat or power, for three weeks. Officials have said at least 2,300 have died.
Reporters from Reuters who reached Mariupol on Monday described an “apocalyptic wasteland”, with bodies lying by the road in blankets, windows blasted out of charred apartment blocks, and groups of men digging graves by the roadside.
Ivan, 26, who managed to escape with part of his family over the weekend, told the Guardian that describing the city as hell was “putting it mildly”. Electricity, water, gas and mobile signals were cut by 2 March, he said, as missile attacks increased.
He and his family, like the hundreds of thousands of others trapped inside, had to make fires out of wood and grass to cook food on. “At first, we found it really hard to cook,” said Ivan. “But then we learned how to time it quickly. We ate once a day.”
The UN said more than 10 million people, a quarter of Ukraine’s pre-war population, had been displaced by the conflict, including 3.4 million who had fled abroad, mainly to Poland. It also confirmed more than 900 civilian deaths, though the actual figure is sure to be significantly higher.
“The scale of human suffering and forced displacement due to the war far exceeds any worst-case scenario planning,” the director general of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), António Vitorino, said on Monday.
As EU foreign and defence ministers gathered in Brussels to discuss further sanctions against Moscow, authorities in Kyiv said airstrikes in the Podil district had flattened a shopping centre and badly damaged apartment blocks. The mayor, Vitali Klitschko, announced a curfew from Monday night until Wednesday morning.
Ukraine’s prosecutor general said eight people had died in the bombardment on Sunday night. He also said a Russian shell had struck a chemical plant outside the eastern city of Sumy at about 3am on Monday, causing a leak in a 50-tonne tank of ammonia.
A Russian military spokesperson, Igor Konashenkov, claimed the leak was a “planned provocation” by Ukrainian forces, adding that Russian forces had killed 80 foreign and Ukrainian troops in an overnight cruise missile strike on a military training centre in the Rivne region of western Ukraine.
Russian intelligence said hundreds of mines had drifted into the Black Sea from Ukrainian ports, a claim Ukraine dismissed as disinformation. The US, meanwhile, said it could not independently confirm or refute Russian claims that it fired hypersonic missiles at Ukrainian targets at the weekend.
Military experts have warned that Moscow’s forces, denied an early victory, are increasingly turning to the scorched earth tactics of previous offensives in Syria and Chechnya, pulverising population centres with airstrikes and artillery bombardments.
Russia’s ground advance has stalled along most fronts, with its forces held up by highly effective Ukrainian resistance and major logistical problems, so far failing to capture a single major Ukrainian city since the invasion started on 24 February.
Britain’s Ministry of Defence said on Monday that Russia’s assault on Kyiv had largely ground to a halt with the bulk of Russian forces more than 15 miles (25km) from the city centre.
It warned, however, that Kyiv “remains Russia’s primary military objective” and more “indiscriminate shelling of urban areas, widespread destruction, and large numbers of civilian casualties” could follow.
Conditions in some encircled and heavily bombarded cities in the south, such as Mariupol, and east, such as Kharkiv, Sumy and Chernihiv, are atrocious, with whole urban areas destroyed by airstrikes and artillery shells.
The mayor of Kharkiv, Igor Terekhov, said hundreds of buildings, many of them residential, had been destroyed in the country’s second largest city. “It is impossible to say that the worst days are behind us. We are constantly being bombed, there was shelling again overnight,” he said.
Ukrainian officials accused Russian troops of firing on protesters in the southern city of Kherson as they demonstrated against the occupation, posting a video on Twitter showing a man with an armband of the Ukrainian flag wounded by gunfire.
A 96-year-old Holocaust survivor, Boris Romantschenko, was killed in a bomb attack in Kharkiv on Friday. Romantschenko had survived the Buchenwald, Peenemünde, Mittelbau-Dora and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps.
Manolis Androulakis, Greece’s consul general in Mariupol and the last EU diplomat to leave the city, said that what he had seen “I hope no one will ever see. Mariupol will become part of a list of cities that were completely destroyed by war. I don’t need to name them: they are Guernica, Coventry, Aleppo, Grozny, Leningrad.”
Russian airstrikes have hit a theatre in Mariupol where more than 1,000 civilians were thought to be sheltering and an art school sheltering a further 400 people. Zelenskiy said on Monday people were “still under the rubble, and we don’t know how many of them have survived”.
