Rubble of the children’s hospital severely damaged by Russian bombing of Mariupol in southern Ukraine, March 9, 2022

EA on Pakistan’s PTV World: Information v. Disinformation Over Russia’s Killing of Civilians

Ukraine War, Day 27: Russia’s “War Crimes”; Almost 10,000 Russian Troops Killed?

UPDATE 1745 GMT:

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko says one person was killed and two seriously wounded by Russian shells falling on a shopping center’s parking lot in the north of the capital.

UPDATE 1740 GMT:

Russia has buried the deputy commander of its Black Sea Fleet, Andrei Nikolayevich Paly, in a funeral service in Russian-occupied in annexed Crimea.

The Russian governor of occupied Sevastopol Province said last week that Paly was killed in action near the besieged port city of Mariupol in southern Ukraine.

The Ukraine Government and military say six Russian generals have also been slain during the invasion.

UPDATE 1735 GMT:

Addressing France’s National Assembly, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has called for French companies such as automobile manufacturer Renault and retailer Auchan to leave Russia.

Renault, Auchan, Leroy Merlin must stop being sponsors of the Russian war machine, stop financing the murder of children and women, of rape.

UPDATE 1415 GMT:

Belarus has ordered almost all Ukrainian diplomats to leave the country, claiming unfriendly actions and meddling in its internal affairs.

The Belarusian Foreign Ministry said that the diplomats must leave within 72 hours and that the Ukrainian Consulate in the city of Brest will be closed due to a lack of staff.

The Ukrainian Ambassador and four other diplomats wiil be allowed to stay.

UPDATE 1407 GMT:

Russian journalist Alexander Nevzorov is being investigated for reporting on social media that Moscow’s forces shelled the children’s hospital and maternity ward in Mariupol in southern Ukraine.

See Russia Bombs Children’s Hospital as 1,170 Killed in Mariupol

Nevzorov wrote Russia’s top investigator, Alexander Bastrykin, that he is being assailing for basing his analysis on information from the international media rather than the press releases of the Russian Defense Ministry.

He challenged the Russian law, implemented after the invasion, threatening up to 15 years in prison for reporting on the war. The journalist said it was against the Russian Constitution and established media law.

The Investigative Committee law enforcement agency said it had opened a case against Nevzorov for posting on Instagram and YouTube that Russia’s armed forces had deliberately shelled a maternity hospital in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol.

Nevzorov said the case against him was meant as a signal to journalists in Russia that “the regime is not going to spare anyone, and that any attempts to comprehend the criminal war will end in prison”.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on Nevzorov’s specific case, but said the tough new law was justified by what he called the most brutal information war being waged against Russia.

UPDATE 1400 GMT:

Trying to prop up the rouble, Vladimir Putin has ordered Russia’s State energy company Gazprom to convert oil and gas contracts with “hostile countries” into the local currency.

Putin said supply of Russian goods to the European Union and US for payment in dollars and euros “does not make any sense for us”.

UPDATE 1230 GMT:

The Kremlin has been unsettled by Poland’s proposal, to be tabled at the emergency NATO summit on Thursday, for peacekeeping forces in Ukraine.

Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call, “It would be a very reckless and extremely dangerous decision…[which] could have clear consequences that would be hard to repair”.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said to staff and students at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, “This will be the direct clash between the Russian and NATO armed forces that everyone has not only tried to avoid but said should not take place in principle.”

UPDATE 1210 GMT:

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has hesitated about restricting purchases of energy from Russia.

Scholz told legislators in the Bundestag:

Yes, we will end this dependency as soon as possible. But to do this from one day to the next would mean plunging our country and the whole of Europe into a recession.

Hundreds of thousands of jobs would be in danger. Whole branches of industry would be on the brink. Sanctions should not hurt European states harder than the Russian leadership.

UPDATE 1010 GMT:

Dmitri Alperovitch, the founder of the cyber-security firm CrowdStrike, posts an audio in which a Russian officer — on the frontline in southern Ukraine — purportedly tells superiors of serious problems with the offensive.

UPDATE 0952 GMT:

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has addressed the Japanese Parliament by video.

He thanked Japan for leading Asian countries in condemnation of the Russian invasion and introduction of sanctions. He asked for further pressure with a trade embargo on Russian goods.

UPDATE 0947 GMT:

France’s TotalEnergies announces that it “has unilaterally decided to no longer enter into or renew contracts to purchase Russian oil and petroleum products, in order to halt all its purchases of Russian oil and petroleum products as soon as possible and by the end of 2022 at the latest”.

But Total CEO Patrick Pouyanne rejected an end to natural gas purchases: “I know how to replace this oil and diesel fuel. With gas, I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to replace it, there isn’t any other available, and I have 25-year contracts that I can’t get out of.”

Pouyanne said that, until European governments impose sanctions on Russian gas — allow companies to breaking contracts — withdrawal from existing deals would require TotalEnergies to pay billions in penalties to its Russian partners.

Unlike Shell and BP, TotalEnergies will retain its stakes in Russian companies and hydrocarbon projects. The company claimed it will be impossible to find a non-Russian buyer so “abandoning these interests without consideration would enrich Russian investors, in contradiction with the sanctions’ purpose”.

The French company owns 19.4% of Novatek PJSC, Russia’s top producer of liquefied natural gas.

Total has a stake in the Yamal LNG plant, an Arctic still under construction, but said it will no longer provide capital for development.

UPDATE 0830 GMT:

Human Rights Watch has condemned the 9-year sentence imposed on anti-Putin activist Alexei Navalny by a Russian court on Tuesday.

“This verdict is apparently intended not only to silence Navalny but to serve as a warning to Russian civil society and anyone who dares to stand up to the Kremlin’s policies,” said Hugh Williamson, HRW’s Europe and Central Asia director.

Navalny, already serving a 2 1/2-year sentence after surviving a Novichok nerve agent attack, was charged with embezzling money from his own Anti-Corruption Foundation. He was also fined the equivalent of $11,200.

“The cases against Navalny are part of the Kremlin’s grim landscape of repression against Russia’s civil society and peaceful dissent, which has drastically intensified since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine,” Williamson noted.

UPDATE 0733 GMT:

The Ukraine military claims Belarusian rebels have partially removed a railway connection between Belarus and Ukraine, limiting any attempt at a cross-border assault on Ukraine from the north.

On the territory of Belarus, representatives of the opposition forces and caring citizens, who condemn the contribution of the current illegal power of the Russian Federation in the war with Ukraine, partially removed the railway connection between the Republic of Belarus and Ukraine. The information is being specified.

UPDATE 0728 GMT:

Ukraine’s Prosecutor General says 121 children have been killed and 167 wounded in the Russian invasion.

Latest victims include a 9-year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine. They were killed, along with an adult, by Russian shelling of an apartment building in the town of Rubizhne in the Ukrainian-controlled part of Donetsk.

The statement added that more than 220 schools and 155 kindergartens have been damaged by Russian shelling.

The UN reports 953 civilians killed and 1,557 injured, but cautions that the actual figure it is likely to be far higher.

UPDATE 0720 GMT:

Trying to cut off aid and prevent evacuations, Russian forces have reportedly bombed a bridge near Chernihiv in northern Ukraine.

The head of the Chernihiv regional administration and Ukraine’s Interior Ministry both reported the attack on the city, about 150 km (93 miles) northeast of Kyiv.

Chernihiv has withstood repeated Russian attempts at occupation since the start of the invasion.

Lyudmila Denisova, Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, explained:

Today Chernihiv remains completely cut off from the capital. The occupiers bombed the bridge across the river Desna, through which transported humanitarian aid to the city and evacuated civilians.

“The city has no electricity, water, heat and almost no gas, infrastructure is destroyed.
According to local residents, the occupiers are compiling lists of civilians for the “evacuation” to Lgov [in Russaia]. The racists, cutting off Chernihiv from the capital, turned its inhabitants into hostages.

The Ukraine military

officials said rebels operating in Belarus against Russia’s war on Ukraine partially removed a railway connection between Belarus and Ukraine.

“On the territory of Belarus, representatives of the opposition forces and caring citizens, who condemn the contribution of the current illegal power of the Russian Federation in the war with Ukraine, partially removed the railway connection between the Republic of Belarus and Ukraine. The information is being specified,” the report, published by Ukraine’s the ministry of defence, read.

ORIGINAL ENTRY: Russia’s forces maintain their siege on the southern port city of Mariupol, seizing humanitarian aid and detaining the drivers and emergency workers on Tuesday.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy announced the seizure in a video address, “Employees of the state emergency service and bus drivers have been taken captive.

He said residents are living “in inhumane conditions. In a total blockade. Without food, water, medication. Under constant shelling, under constant bombing”.

Presidential aide Kyrylo Tymoshenko said almost 6,000 residents were able to flee in private vehicles on Tuesday, heading northwest for Zaporizhzhia.

But Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk added:

Unfortunately, the occupying forces violated the agreement and did not allow buses to evacuate Mariupol residents from the village of Nikolske and the village of Melekino.

There are eleven buses and two vehicles of the State Emergency Service that were seized at a Russian checkpoint at the entrance to the city of Mangush and taken away in an unknown direction.

The occupiers also took hostage 4 [emergency service] officers and 11 drivers. We demand from the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations to do everything urgently to ensure that our people are released immediately.

“Shelling Never Stops”

Zelenskiy, Ukrainian officials, and foreign counterparts have accused Russia of war crimes over its siege of almost four weeks. There is no heat, water, or electricity, and food is scarce.

Ukraine MP Dmytro Gurin, a native of Mariupol, said on Wednesday:

The shelling never stops, the shooting never stops. Now there’s 300,000 people in Mariupol without food. It’s not war anymore. We clearly see that Russia wants to start hunger just to force its diplomatic position.

Mariupol is at the eastern end of a 250-km (155-mile) coastal corridor along the Black Sea and Sea of Azov.

The area is the single front where Russian ground offensive have succeeded, taking cities such as Kherson and Melitopol. However, the Russians are having trouble controlling even the occupied territory, facing rallies by residents.

Russian forces have used stun grenades and fired to disperse the demonstrators. A letter, purportedly written by an official in Russia’s intelligence service FSB, warns that the Kremlin is no longer willing to “play nicely” and will unleash a “great terror” on Kherson by kidnapping residents and taking them across the Russian border. It also threatens the “liquidation” of protest leaders if they can be identified.

The Russian military issued an ultimatum for Mariupol to surrender by 5 a.m. Monday morning, but both local officials and the Zelenskiy defied the threat.

A “senior US defence official” said on Wednesday that Russian forces are inside the city. Local authorities reported two “super-powerful bombs”, following Russia’s attacks on civilian sites such as the children’s hospital and the Drama Theater, where the fate of several hundred sheltering people is still unknown. Overhead video showed Russian strikes on the city’s factories.

See also Russia’s “Final Solution” For Mariupol; 56 Elderly Reportedly Killed by Shelling

Ukraine War, Day 25: “Several Thousand Mariupol Residents Deported to Russia”

Russian Offensive Struggling Outside South

Beyond the southern corridor, Russia’s invasion force is still stalled. For days, there has been no advance beyond 25 km (16 miles) from the capital Kyiv, where a 38-hour curfew ends at 10 a.m. on Wednesday.

Ukrainian officials announced the recapture of some territory. Video showed local authorities inspecting damaged buildings in Makariv, west of Kyiv, with the declaration that the Ukraine flag is again flying above the city.

In the south, the Russians have been repelled and are no longer attacking Mykolaiv, a key city on the Dnieper River, according to Ukrainian and foreign officials.

A “senior US defense official” says Russia’s combat power in Ukraine is below 90% of pre-invasion levels for the first time, amid heavy losses of weaponry, mounting casualties, and problems with command-and-control, morale, and reliance on conscripts.

The official said the Russians were still about 30 km (19 miles) to the east of Kyiv, “which is where they were last week”. He spoke of the “morale issues” as Russian forces troops “did not expect this level of resistance”.

Some of them were not told what they were actually going to be doing inside Ukraine. We know they relied on conscripts, and they still do. I mean, still it has been largely a conscript army. And so these are very young men who haven’t — don’t have a long experience with soldiering and — and we believe that all those factors are combining to affect their morale.

Zelenskiy summarized in his video address:

We are continuing to work on various levels to push Russia towards peace, towards the end of this brutal war. Ukrainian representatives are continuing negotiations that basically take place daily. It is very hard, sometimes, scandalous. But step by step we are moving forward….

New packages of sanctions, new support. We’ll keep working and will keep fighting as much as we can. Until the end. Courageously and openly. On all of those platforms. With full energy. With all our strength. And we will not get tired. We will have rest when we win. And it will definitely happen.