Good Morning America

What’s the cost of damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure amid Russia’s invasion?

Morgan Winsor – March 28, 2022

The cost of direct damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure amid Russia’s ongoing invasion has reached almost an estimated $63 billion, according to an analysis by the Kyiv School of Economics.

Shocking images and videos have emerged in recent weeks showing just some of the devastation across Ukraine since Russian forces attacked on Feb. 24. Where businesses, homes, hospitals, schools and other infrastructure once stood, there are now massive piles of unrecognizable rubble and crumbling shells of concrete.

The KSE Institute, an analytical unit of the Kyiv School of Economics in Ukraine’s capital, has been collecting and analyzing data from the “Russia Will Pay” project, launched in collaboration with the Ukrainian president’s office and the Ukrainian Ministry of Economy.

Through the resource, Ukrainian citizens, government officials and local authorities can confidentially submit reports on the loss of or damage to physical infrastructure across the country as a result of the war, including roads, residential buildings, businesses and other facilities. Analysts at the KSE Institute then assess those reported damages and estimate the financial value.

“It is aimed at collecting information about all the facilities destroyed as a result of the war that Russia waged against Ukraine,” the KSE Institute said in a recent statement about the “Russia Will Pay” resource. “The Ukrainian government will use this data as evidence in international courts for Russia to compensate for the intended damages.”

The latest analysis shows that, as of March 24, at least 4,431 residential buildings, 92 factories and warehouses, 378 institutions of secondary and higher education, 138 health care institutions, 12 airports, seven thermal power plants and hydroelectric power plants have been damaged, destroyed or seized in Ukraine since the start of the Russian invasion on Feb. 24 — totaling an estimated $62,889,000. Compared to the previous estimate published on March 17, net growth amounted to $3.5 billion, according to the KSE Institute.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s overall economic losses due to the war — taking into account both direct losses calculated from the project as well as indirect losses, like GDP decline — range from $543 billion to $600 billion, according to an estimate by the KSE Institute and the Ukrainian Ministry of Economy.

Before updating its calculations, the KSE Institute said it received “detailed data” from the Ukrainian Ministry of Infrastructure on the destruction of its facilities, which allowed analysts to clarify and, in some cases, reduce the assessment of losses.

The KSE Institute said it has improved the methodology of assessing losses from the destruction of residential real estate “based on the World Bank’s experience in analyzing losses in Syria and Iraq, as well as the recommendations of the leading Ukrainian investment company Dragon Capital.”

“These calculations are based on the analysis of several thousands of public notifications from Ukrainian citizens, the government, local authorities about losses and damages throughout the country, as well as indirect assessment methods such as calculating the estimated area of the war-damaged property in the most affected cities,” the KSE Institute said. “These estimates are not exhaustive: information on numerous damages and destruction may be missing due to the inability of citizens, local and state authorities to promptly record the damage in each city and town.”

Associated Press

Ukrainians claim to retake ground ahead of latest talks

Yuras Karmanau – March 28, 2022

LVIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian forces claimed to have retaken a Kyiv suburb and an eastern town from the Russians in what is becoming a back-and-forth stalemate on the ground, while negotiators began assembling for another round of talks Tuesday aimed at stopping the fighting.

Ahead of the talks, to be held in Istanbul, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his country is prepared to declare its neutrality, as Moscow has demanded, and is open to compromise on the fate of the Donbas, the contested region in the country’s east.

The mayor of Irpin, a northwestern Kyiv suburb that has been the scene of some of the heaviest fighting near the capital, said Monday that the city has been “liberated” from Russian troops.

Zelenskyy warned that Russian forces are trying to regroup after losing the area.

“We still have to fight, we have to endure,” the president said late Monday in his nighttime video address to the nation. “We can’t express our emotions now. We can’t raise expectations, simply so that we don’t burn out.”

Irpin gained wide attention after photos circulated of a mother and her two children who were killed by shelling as they tried to flee, their bodies lying on the pavement with luggage and a pet carrier nearby.

A senior U.S. defense official said the U.S. believes the Ukrainians have also retaken the town of Trostyanets, south of Sumy, in the east.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss U.S. intelligence assessments, said Russian forces largely remained in defensive positions near the capital, Kyiv, and were making little forward progress elsewhere in the country.

The official said Russia appeared to be de-emphasizing ground operations near Kyiv and concentrating more on the Donbas, the predominantly Russian-speaking region where Moscow-backed rebels have been waging a separatist war for the past eight years.

Late last week, with its forces bogged down in parts of the country, Russia seemed to scale back its war aims, saying its main goal was gaining control of the Donbas.

While that suggested a possible face-saving exit strategy for Russian President Vladimir Putin, it also raised Ukrainian fears that the Kremlin intends to split the country in two and force it to surrender a swath of its territory.

Meanwhile, a cyberattack knocked Ukraine’s national telecommunications provider Ukrtelecom almost completely offline. The chief of Ukraine’s state service for special communication, Yurii Shchyhol, blamed “the enemy” without specifically naming Russia and said most customers were cut off from telephone, internet and mobile service so that coverage could continue for Ukraine’s military.

Also Monday, an oil depot in western Ukraine’s Rivne region was hit by a missile attack, the governor said. It was the second attack on oil facilities in the region near the Polish border.

In recent days, Ukrainian troops have pushed the Russians back in other sectors.

In the city of Makariv, near a strategic highway west of the capital, Associated Press reporters saw the carcass of a Russian rocket launcher, a burned Russian truck, the body of a Russian soldier and a destroyed Ukrainian tank after fighting there a few days ago. In the nearby village of Yasnohorodka, the AP witnessed positions abandoned by Ukrainian soldiers who had moved farther west, but no sign of Russian troops.

And on Friday, the U.S. defense official said the Russians were no longer in full control of Kherson, the first major city to fall to Moscow’s forces. The Kremlin denied it had lost full control of the southern city.

Russia has long demanded that Ukraine drop any hope of joining NATO, which Moscow sees as a threat. Zelenskyy, for his part, has stressed that Ukraine needs security guarantees of its own as part of any deal.

Over the weekend, Zelenskyy said he is ready to agree to neutrality. He also said that “Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity are beyond doubt,” while suggesting at the same time that compromise might be possible over “the complex issue of Donbas.”

The Ukrainian leader has suggested as much before but rarely commented so extensively. That could create momentum for the talks, for which the Russian delegates arrived in Istanbul on Monday, Turkish media reported.

Still, it was not clear how a compromise on the Donbas would square with maintaining Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

In other developments:

— President Joe Biden made no apologies for calling for Putin’s ouster, saying he was expressing his “moral outrage,” not a new U.S. policy. Over the weekend, Biden said, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” On Monday, the president said: “I’m not walking anything back.”

— U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he has launched an effort to achieve a humanitarian cease-fire that would allow aid to be brought in and people to move around safely.

— Russia’s invasion has most Americans at least somewhat worried that the U.S. will be drawn directly into the conflict and could be targeted with nuclear weapons, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

— T he Group of Seven major economies rejected a Kremlin demand that some countries pay in rubles for Russia’s natural gas. That demand appeared designed to support the Russian currency, which is under pressure from Western sanctions.

Earlier talks, both by video and in person, have failed to make progress on ending the more than month-old war that has killed thousands and driven more than 10 million Ukrainians from their homes. That includes almost 4 million who have fled the country.

In the besieged southern port of Mariupol, the mayor said half the pre-war population of more than 400,000 has fled, often under fire, during weeks of shooting and shelling.

Alina Beskrovna, who escaped the city in a convoy of cars and made it to Poland, said desperate people are melting snow for water and cooking on open fires despite the risk of bombardment, “because if you don’t, you will have nothing to eat.”

“A lot of people are just, I think, starving to death in their apartments right now with no help,” she said. “It’s a mass murder that’s happening at the hands of the Russians.”

Putin’s ground forces have become bogged down because of stronger-than-expected Ukrainian resistance, combined with what Western officials say are Russian tactical missteps, poor morale, shortages of food, fuel and cold weather gear, and other problems. Moscow has resorted to pummeling Ukrainian cities with artillery and airstrikes.

In Stoyanka village near Kyiv, Ukrainian soldier Serhiy Udod said Russian troops had taken up defensive positions and suffered heavy losses.

The Russians probably “thought it would be like Crimea,” which the Kremlin annexed in 2014. “But here it’s not like in Crimea. We are not happy to see them. Here they suffer and get killed.”

Andrea Rosa in Kharkiv, Nebi Qena in Kyiv, Cara Anna in Lviv and Associated Press journalists around the world contributed to this report.

The Week

Zelensky offers a neutral Ukraine for Russian withdrawal, but there are some big caveats

Peter Weber, Senior editor – March 28, 2022

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told a group of independent Russian journalists on Sunday that he is ready to discuss enshrining Ukraine as a neutral country, without NATO aspirations, as part of a peace deal with Russia, in return for ironclad security guarantees.

“Security guarantees and the neutral, non-nuclear status of our state. We are ready to accept this. This is the most important point,” Zelensky said. “This was the first point of principle for the Russian Federation, as I recall. And as far as I remember, they started the war because of this.” He rejected even discussing Russia’s demands that Ukraine be “de-Nazified” or demilitarized,” and said “the issues of Donbas and Crimea must be discussed and solved” in peace talks.

Zelenksy later told Ukrainians that in negotiations with Russia, “the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine are beyond doubt.”

“On the face of it,” Zelensky’s offer “sounds like something of a breakthrough,” the BBC’s Jonah Fisher writes from Lviv. “But there are a number of important caveats.” Zelensky made clear Western countries would have to guarantee Ukraine’s security, neutrality would have to be put to a public referendum, and crucially, Russia would have to withdraw to its positions before its Feb. 24 invasion.

“Having fought so hard to gain ground, it’s very hard to see Russia agreeing to this, particularly in the south and east,” Fisher suggests. “And finally and most important of all, there’s the unanswered question of what Russia actually wants from this war. Is it about security and Ukraine’s NATO ambitions as was first claimed? Is it about more territory in eastern Ukraine? Or is President Putin determined to permanently disable Ukraine’s ability to function as an independent sovereign nation?”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said a meeting between Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin would be “couterproductive” at this point, before the two countries have agreed on key issues. Ukrainian and Russian negotiators will hold peace talks in Turkey this week. And while the Kremlin is surely aware of Zelenksy’s offer, it forbade any other Russian media organizations to broadcast any part of Zelensky’s interview.

Associated Press

Russia shifts focus to try to grind Ukraine’s army in east

Nebi Qena and Yuras Karmanau – March 28, 2022

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — With its aspirations for a quick victory dashed by a stiff Ukrainian resistance, Russia has increasingly focused on grinding down Ukraine’s military in the east in the hope of forcing Kyiv into surrendering part of the country’s territory to possibly end the war.

The bulk of the Ukrainian army is concentrated in eastern Ukraine, where it has been locked up in fighting with Moscow-backed separatists in a nearly eight-year conflict. If Russia succeeds in encircling and destroying the Ukrainian forces in the country’s industrial heartland, called Donbas, it could try to dictate its terms to Kyiv and potentially attempt to split the country in two.

The Russian military declared Friday that the “first stage of the operation” had been largely accomplished, allowing Russian troops to concentrate on their “top goal — the liberation of Donbas.”

Many observers say the shift in strategy could reflect President Vladimir Putin’s acknowledgment that his plan for a blitz in Ukraine has failed, forcing him to narrow his goals and change tactics amid a disastrous war that has turned Russia into a pariah and decimated its economy.

In some sectors, Ukrainian troops have recently pushed the Russians back.

In the city of Makariv, near a strategic highway west of the capital, Kyiv, Associated Press reporters saw the carcass of a Russian rocket launcher, a burned Russian truck, the body of a Russian soldier and a destroyed Ukrainian tank after fighting there a few days ago. In the nearby village of Yasnohorodka, the AP witnessed positions abandoned by Ukrainian soldiers who had moved farther west, but no sign of Russian troops’ presence.

U.S. and British officials have noted that Moscow has increasingly focused on fighting the Ukrainian forces in the east while digging in around Kyiv and other big cities and pummeling them with rockets and artillery.

The chief of Ukrainian military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, said Sunday the change of focus could reflect Putin’s hope to break Ukraine in two, like North and South Korea, and enforce “a line of separation between the occupied and unoccupied regions.”

“He can’t swallow the entire country,” Budanov said, adding that Russia appears to be trying “to pull the occupied territories into a single quasi-state structure and pit it against independent Ukraine.”

Putin and his generals haven’t revealed specific military goals or a planned timeline, but the Kremlin clearly expected a quick victory when Russian troops rolled into Ukraine from the north, east and south on Feb. 24.

But the Russian attempts to swiftly capture Kyiv, the country’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, and other big cities in the northeast have been thwarted by well-organized Ukrainian defenses and logistical challenges that stalled the Russian offensive.

Russian forces have pounded the outskirts of Kyiv with artillery and air raids from a distance while putting their ground offensive on hold, tactics they also have used in attacking Kharkiv, Chernihiv and Sumy in the northeast.

Mykola Sunhurovskyi, a military analyst at the Kyiv-based Razumkov Center think tank, said Russia has abandoned attempts to storm Kyiv and other big Ukrainian cities for now and is laying siege to them to try to weaken Ukraine and win time.

“Russia has shifted tactics … to redistribute its forces and prepare for the next active stage of the war,” Sunhurovskyi said.

The Russian forces encircled the key strategic port of Mariupol and besieged it for weeks, hammering it with rockets and artillery i n a carnage that killed thousands of civilians. The fall of Mariupol would free up Russian forces there and allow them to engage in a potential pincer movement together with another group of troops moving from Kharkiv in the northeast to try to encircle the Ukrainian military in the east.

“Russian forces appear to be concentrating their effort to attempt the encirclement of Ukrainian forces directly facing the separatist regions in the east of the country, advancing from the direction of Kharkiv in the north and Mariupol in the south,” the British Ministry of Defense said Sunday.

A senior U.S. defense official, noting the latest Russian focus on Donbas, said Putin may now hope to take full control of the east while keeping other Ukrainian forces occupied with the defense of Kyiv and other areas, then try to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to formally surrender Donbas and recognize Russia’s ownership of Crimea, which Moscow annexed in 2014.

An analysis published Saturday by the Institute for the Study of War in Washington said the degree to which the Russians can push an accelerated move to cut off Donbas will depend in part on how soon their forces can gain full control of Mariupol and how badly damaged they emerge from that fight. It also noted that a halt in the Russian offensive on Kyiv could reflect “the incapacity of Russian forces rather than any shift in Russian objectives or efforts at this time.”

While the Russian military has focused increasingly on bleeding the Ukrainian troops in the east, it has continued to use its arsenal of air- and sea-launched cruise missiles to methodically target fuel depots, military arsenals and weapons plants across the country.

Philips P. O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews, described Saturday’s cruise missile strikes on Lviv, near the border with Poland, as part of the Russian strategy to cut off supplies to the Ukrainian forces fighting in the east.

“They will still want to disrupt as much as possible the flow of goods and supplies from west to east, much of which starts their journey around Lviv,” O’Brien said.

On the Black Sea coast, the Russians quickly took the port of Kherson and advanced to the outskirts of the key shipbuilding center of Mykolaiv where their offensive stalled.

If the Russian forces succeed in encircling Mykolaiv, Odesa and several other Black Sea ports, it will have completely cut Ukraine’s access to its coast in a devastating blow to its economy. The seizure of Odesa will also allow Moscow to establish a link to the separatist Trans-Dniester region of Moldova that hosts a Russian military base.

Despite Ukrainian and Western fears, the Russian army so far hasn’t pursued efforts to bypass Mykolaiv and march on Odesa. Ukrainian authorities have noted that Russia’s failure to press its offensive along the coast could be explained by the fact that most of its troops in the south have remained locked in the battle for Mariupol where they have suffered heavy losses.

On Friday, the Russian military reported it had lost 1,351 soldiers killed and 3,825 wounded since the start of the campaign, but NATO estimates 7,000 to 15,000 have been killed — potentially as many as the Soviet Union lost in the entire 10-year war in Afghanistan.

The big losses and slow pace of the Russian offensive could be a factor that forced Putin to lower his ambitions and take a more realistic approach.

Volodymyr Fesenko, the head of the independent Kyiv-based Penta Center, said Russia’s declared shift to the east could be an attempt to put a good face on its failed blitz and regroup before the next stage of fighting.

“Both sides need a break now for various reasons, and the Kremlin is using it to regroup its forces and search for new tactics without changing its strategic goal of subduing Ukraine,” Fesenko told the AP.

“Tactics could change from a blitz to laying siege to cities, destroying the economy and the infrastructure with bombardment, blockading ports and doing other things. Putin has a broad arsenal of means of pressure.”

“The stiff Ukrainian resistance could turn the war into a protracted conflict, and then the issue of financial and military resources, including warplanes and tanks Zelenskyy is urging the West to provide will be of primary importance,” he said.

Karmanau reported from Lviv, Ukraine. Robert Burns and Matthew Lee in Washington and Danica Kirka in London contributed to this report.

Insider

A Ukrainian woman recounts being raped by the Russian soldiers who killed her husband: ‘Shall we kill her or keep her alive?’

Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert – March 28, 2022

• A Ukrainian woman said she was repeatedly assaulted by Russian soldiers after they killed her husband.
• Her claims are being investigated by the Ukraine prosecutor-general, the first such investigation.
• “This younger guy pulled gun to my head and said: ‘I shot your husband because he’s a Nazi.'” she said.

A Ukrainian woman who said she was repeatedly assaulted by Russian soldiers after they killed her husband is having her allegations investigated by Ukrainian officials, the first such investigation into a rape by Russian soldiers since the beginning of the invasion.

“I heard a single shot, the sounds of the gate opening and then the sound of footsteps in the house,” an anonymous woman, who went by the pseudonym Natalya, told The Times.

On March 9, two Russian soldiers who had earlier killed the family’s dog while walking by her home near Shevchenkove, outside Kyiv, had returned to kill her husband, she said. “I cried out, ‘Where is my husband?’ Then I looked outside and I saw him on the ground by the gate. This younger guy pulled gun to my head and said: ‘I shot your husband because he’s a Nazi.'”

Natalya told The Times she told her 4-year-old son to hide in the boiler room where they had been sheltering. The soldiers repeatedly raped her as her son cried in the next room.

“He said ‘you’d better shut up or I’ll get your child and show him his mother’s brains spread around the house,'” she told The Times. “He told me to take my clothes off. Then they both raped me one after the other. They didn’t care that my son was in the boiler room crying. They told me to go shut him up and come back. All the time they held the gun by my head and taunted me, saying ‘how do you think she sucks it? Shall we kill her or keep her alive?'”

Her story is one of multiple reports of sexual violence and rape during the invasion of Ukraine and the first to be investigated by Ukraine’s prosecutor general. Earlier this month, Ukrainian member of parliament Lesia Vasylenko spoke to UK officials about the rising reports of rape.

“We have reports of women being gang-raped. These women are usually the ones who are unable to get out. We are talking about senior citizens,” The Guardian reported Vasylenko said. “Most of these women have either been executed after the crime of rape or they have taken their own lives.”

Natalya and her son have since fled, leaving the home her husband built for them and his body behind. She hasn’t yet told her son that his father died. “We cannot bury him, we can’t get to the village, because the village is still occupied,” she said.

Even if the Brovary district is liberated, she does not know if she will return. “Memories are hard,” she told The Times. “I don’t know how I will live with all of it but I still understand that my husband built this house for us. I would never be able to bring myself to sell it.”

The Telegraph

Ukraine morning briefing: Five developments as Russia warns NATO not to ‘push us into the corner’

Our Foreign Staff – March 28, 2022

Good morning. Another round of talks aimed at stopping the war in Ukraine is scheduled for today as the fighting continues on the ground, with the two sides trading control of a town in the east and a suburb of the capital.

Ukrainian forces retook Irpin, north-west of Kyiv, from Russian troops, who were regrouping to take the area back, President Volodymyr Zelensky said late on Monday as he sought to rally the country.

1. Don’t push us into a corner, Kremlin tells NATO

The Kremlin on Monday night warned NATO not to “push us into a corner” and said Russia felt it was “amongst war” with the West due to severe sanctions.

Referencing Russia’s tension with NATO, Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for the Kremlin, told the US broadcaster PBS: “For a couple of decades, we were telling the collective West that we are afraid of your NATO’s moving eastwards. We too are afraid of NATO getting closer to our borders with its military infrastructure.

“Please take care of that. Don’t push us into the corner. No.”

2. Abramovich poison claims ‘very concerning’

The Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office has described the claims that Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich suffered suspected poisoning during attempts to aid peace talks in Ukraine as “very concerning”.

The office said the UK would “continue to assist” by imposing tough sanctions on Russia, as well as providing defensive and humanitarian support so Ukraine can be “in the strongest possible negotiating position”.

British defence intelligence analysts have warned more than 1,000 Russian mercenaries are expected to deploy to eastern Ukraine to undertake combat operations.

3. Zelensky demands urgent sanctions

Volodymyr Zelensky has urged Western nations to toughen sanctions quickly against Russia, including an oil embargo, to stop Moscow having a free hand to escalate its measures against his country.

In his nightly video address to Ukrainians, a clearly irritated Mr Zelensky said the West had miscalculated last year in delaying sanctions and the invasion had followed.

“A full-scale war has begun. Now there are many hints and warnings that supposedly tougher sanctions, such as an embargo on Russian oil supplies to Europe, will be put in place if Russia uses chemical weapons,” Ukraine’s president said, occasionally banging his hands on a table.

“There are simply no words… We, people who are alive, have to wait. Doesn’t everything the Russia military has done to date warrant an oil embargo? Don’t phosphorous bombs warrant it? A shelled chemical production facility or a shelled nuclear power plant doesn’t warrant it?”

4. Amnesty accuses Russia of war crimes

Amnesty International has accused Russia of committing war crimes in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol.

The human rights organisation will soon release an in-depth report on the devastation caused by Russia’s assault on the city on the Sea of Azov, Amnesty’s Secretary-General Agnes Callamard said in a press conference in Johannesburg.

“The siege of Mariupol, the denial of humanitarian evacuation and humanitarian escape for the population, and the targeting of civilians, according to Amnesty International’s investigation, amounts to war crimes,” said Ms Callamard.

“That is the reality of Ukraine right now.”

Ms Callamard said “the crisis in Ukraine right now, the invasion… is not just any kind of violation of international law. It is an aggression. It is a violation of the UN charter of the kind that we saw when the US invaded Iraq.”

5. Biden defends calling for Putin’s removal

Joe Biden said he made “no apologies” for calling for Vladimir Putin’s removal, but claimed he was expressing his “personal feelings” not a new US policy as he defended his off-the-cuff remark.

White House officials scrambled into damage control mode after Mr Biden sparked an international backlash by stating that Mr Putin “cannot remain in power” during a major speech in Europe on Saturday.

The US president defended the remarks during a terse press conference at the White House on Monday.

“I’m not walking anything back. I was expressing the moral outrage I felt to the way Putin is dealing, and the actions of this man, just the brutality of it,” he said.

Reuters

European justice agency backs team probing alleged war crimes in Ukraine

March 28, 2022

BRUSSELS (Reuters) -Eurojust, Europe’s agency for criminal justice cooperation, said on Monday it would support a joint investigation team announced last week to probe allegations of war crimes in Ukraine following Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion.

Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine signed an agreement last week to set up a team to enable the exchange of information and investigation into suspected war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Participation in the team may be extended to other EU member states, third countries or other third parties, Eurojust said in a statement, which did not mention Russia.

“The main aim of the JIT is to support the gathering of evidence and its swift and secure exchange between partners, as well as the transmission of information and evidence,” Eurojust said.

Eurojust said it would provide legal and technical assistance and support evidence gathering and sharing.

The team will also coordinate with the International Criminal Court (ICC), the world’s permanent war crimes tribunal, which opened its own investigation in Ukraine days after Russia’s invasion.

Russia calls its actions in Ukraine a “special military operation” to disarm and “denazify” its neighbour. Kyiv and the West consider this a pretext for an unprovoked invasion.

(Reporting by Marine Strauss @StraussMarine, Anthony Deutsch; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Reuters

Almost 5,000 killed in Mariupol since Russian siege began, mayor’s office

Natalia Zinets – March 28, 2022

LVIV, Ukraine (Reuters) -Nearly 5,000 people, including about 210 children, have been killed in the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol since Russian forces laid siege to it, a spokesperson for the mayor said on Monday.

It was not immediately clear how Mayor Vadym Boichenko had calculated the toll from a month of Russian bombardment that has devastated the city and trapped tens of thousands of residents without power and with few supplies.

Boichenko’s office said 90% of Mariupol’s buildings had been damaged and 40% destroyed, including hospitals, schools, kindergartens and factories.

About 140,000 people had fled the city on the Sea of Azov before the Russian siege began and 150,000 have exited since then, leaving 170,000 still there, according to its figures, which Reuters could not immediately verify.

Boichenko, who is no longer in Mariupol, said on national television earlier on Monday that about 160,000 civilians were still trapped in the city.

“People are beyond the line of humanitarian catastrophe,” he said. “We need to completely evacuate Mariupol.”

Ukraine said it was impossible to create any safe corridors on Monday, citing intelligence reports about possible Russian “provocations” along the routes.

Russia, which invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, denies targeting civilians and blames Ukraine for repeated failures to agree on safe corridors for trapped residents.

“The Russian Federation is playing with us. We are in the hands of the invaders,” Boichenko said.

The two sides are set to resume peace talks on Tuesday in Turkey.

STRATEGIC PRIZE

Mariupol is widely seen as a strategic prize as its capture could enable Russia to create a land bridge between Crimea, annexed by Moscow in 2014, and two separatist enclaves in eastern Ukraine.

People who have fled Mariupol have been describing how tough it was living for weeks under almost constant bombardment.

“There is no food for the children, especially the infants. They delivered babies in basements because women had nowhere to go to give birth, all the maternity hospitals were destroyed,” a grocery worker from Mariupol who gave her name only as Nataliia told Reuters after reaching nearby Zaporizhzhia.

“I also found out today that my son’s classmate’s parents were torn apart right in the yard before his eyes.”

She said trapped residents had spent time looking for snow which they could melt to have water to wash their hands.

Valeriia, a 20-year-old student from Mariupol, said electricity, internet access, water and heating had been cut off on March 2. Soon afterwards, heavy fighting broke out nearby and part of his home was destroyed.

“Constant shooting, shelling. We were sitting in the corridor, we did not sleep or eat properly for several days. Because as soon as you get out of there, the shootings start, and you run back,” she said.

She and her sister were given a ride out of the city by other residents who fled in a private car. They left their parents behind.

Sergiy, a metallurgy plant worker, recalled Grad rockets slamming into buildings and people being killed.

“There was a man walking by, this Grad, as cynical as it sounds, tore him to pieces, a corpse. I saw corpses lying around the city, you could see that a mine had exploded and shrapnel was hitting people,” he said.

(Writing by Timothy Heritage, Editing by Bernadette Baum and Paul Simao)