Ukrainian authorities have been making urgent new efforts to open a viable humanitarian corridor to the besieged southern port of Mariupol, as Russian airstrikes targeted cities in the west in a significant widening of the scope of its campaign.
Hundreds of thousands of civilians remain trapped and under fire in Ukrainian cities, but the situation in Mariupol is especially dire. Ten days into Russia’s siege, its population has no access to electricity or mobile phone networks, and water and food are running out.
Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, said in a video message that authorities were trying once again to send vital supplies to the city and evacuate people to Zaporizhzhia in the country’s interior. Previous evacuation attempts have failed after aid and rescue convoys and fleeing families were targeted by Russian shelling.
“They have a clear order to hold Mariupol hostage, to mock it, to constantly bomb and shell it,” the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said in his nightly address to the nation on Thursday. The Russians, he said, began a tank attack right where there was supposed to be a humanitarian corridor.
The few people who have escaped have reported corpses being left in the street and other victims being buried in mass graves. The regional military administration estimated on Friday that 1,207 people have been killed and that many more could be buried under the debris.
The latest evacuation efforts came as Switzerland’s justice minister, Karin Keller-Sutter, warned that an escalating war in Ukraine could risk displacing 15 million people.
In the US, President Joe Biden announced that the G7 industrialised nations will revoke Russia’s “most favoured nation” trade status and that the US would bring in a ban on Russian seafood, alcohol and diamonds, in the latest economic steps to punish Moscow.
EU leaders also warned that they will continue applying pressure on Russia by devising a new set of “massive” sanctions.
Speaking at the conclusion of a two-day EU summit outside Paris, French president Emmanuel Macron said all options were on the table for a fourth package of coercive measures targeting Russia if Vladimir Putin further escalated his war efforts.
Russian airstrikes in the early hours of Friday struck two airfields in the west of the country, Lutsk and Ivano-Frankivsk, both far from the current frontlines, as well as the eastern industrial city of Dnipro.
A US defence official said that the Pentagon has assessed the strikes were aimed at preventing airfields from being used by Ukrainian forces.
In a further sign that the Russian military was continuing to step up its campaign, new satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies showed that a 40-mile long convoy that has been approaching the Ukrainian capital Kyiv had dispersed, with tanks and artillery moving to what appeared to be firing positions to the north-west of the city.
Other assessments of the redeployment, however, suggested the moves may be defensive and that Russian troops were not yet ready to attack Kyiv.
The Ukrainian military warned Russia was trying to “block” Kyiv by taking out defences to the west and north of the capital as the city prepared for a new assault in the coming days.
Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said that about 2 million people, half the population of the metropolitan area, have left the capital, as preparations continued for its defence.
“Every street, every house is being fortified,” he said. “Even people who in their lives never intended to change their clothes, now they are in uniform with machine guns in their hands.”
In other developments on Friday Russia put unfounded claims of a US-orchestrated biological weapon plot in Ukraine before the UN security council, and Syria’s military began recruiting troops from its own ranks to fight alongside Russian forces, promising payments of $3,000 a month.
Yulia, who fled Mariupol on 3 March, told Agence France-Presse that her mother-in-law had not been able to leave and could call only by making a “really dangerous” journey to a tower far from her home.
“She said she was OK but the attacks don’t stop,” the 29-year-old teacher told the news agency. “There are many corpses on the street and nobody buries them. They lie there for days. Sometimes, utility services collect them and bury them all together in one huge grave.”
Kharkiv has come under relentless bombardment from Russian forces, the city’s mayor, Ihor Terekhov, said, as he reported that 48 of the city’s schools have been destroyed.
Stephen Cornish, head of Doctors Without Borders’ Swiss office, told AFP that Ukraine was “really heading towards an unimaginable tragedy”.
“As we can see, not only in Mariupol, but with credible reports coming from Kharkiv and Dnipro and other areas, every effort is not being made to spare civilians,” Cornish said.
A UN spokesperson said there were credible reports of Russians using cluster munitions, including in populated areas. UN spokesperson Liz Throssell told journalists in Geneva that indiscriminate use of cluster munitions may amount to war crimes.
Cluster bombs, which scatter small munitions over a wide area, are banned by more than 100 countries because they lack precision. Even governments such as Russia, which have not signed the international treaty against the munitions, remain bound by international humanitarian law.
“We remind the Russian authorities that directing attacks against civilians and civilian objects, as well as so-called area bombardment in towns and villages and other forms of indiscriminate attacks, are prohibited under international law and may amount to war crimes,” Throssell said.
The mounting reports of civilian atrocities came as the UN security council met at Russia’s request to discuss Moscow’s unfounded claim that US-backed labs in Ukraine were working on custom-made biological weapons to target Russians. Zelenskiy warned that Russia’s accusations of “biological weapons” were a bad sign.
“Allegedly, we are preparing a chemical attack,” he said. “This makes me really worried, because we have been repeatedly convinced: if you want to know Russia’s plans, look at what Russia accuses others of.”
