Policemen carry the body of a victim from a 5-story residential building destroyed by Russian shelling, Kyiv, Ukraine, March 18, 2022 (Photo by Sergei Supinsky/AFP)

UPDATE 1356 GMT:

Hospital staff in Belarus near the Ukraine border report being overwhelmed with Russian casualties and say thousands of troops have been killed.

There are so many dead & wounded Russian soldiers in Homel region, Belarus, that they've started loading corpses on trains at night "so as not to attract attention." 2,500 KIA sent back to Russia, hospital staff say. That's 5x the official number https://t.co/hhuiJG5j2C pic.twitter.com/SKeX5oaEPh
— Alec Luhn (@ASLuhn) March 19, 2022

UPDATE 1347 GMT:

Russia’s Ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Igor Kalbukhov, has threatened an invasion if the country decides to join NATO.

“Ukraine’s example shows what we expect. Should there be any threat, we will respond,” Kalbukhov said in a TV interview.

UPDATE 1340 GMT:

More than 20% of Ukraine’s 44 million people are refugees or internally displaced because of the Russian invasion, according to UN estimates.

The International Organization for Migration added that millions more are low on food, lack clean water, have no access to medical care, and are without heat and electricity.

Over 12 million people are estimated to be stranded in affected areas or unable to leave due to heightened security risks, destruction of bridges and roads, as well as lack of resources or information on where to find safety and accommodation.

UPDATE 1230 GMT:

Besieging Ukraine’s cities, Russian forces are preventing aid agencies from reaching trapped residents.

Jakob Kern, the emergency coordinator of the UN’s World Food Programme, said the situation is “dire”. He said it has been almost impossible to reach Mariupol in southern Ukraine and Kharkiv and Sumy in the northeast.

Kern noted that the Russian tactics are “unacceptable in the 21st century”.

The WFP hopes to reach 3.1 million people in Ukraine, including hundreds of thousands of trapped women and children, but is struggling to find truck drivers.

UPDATE 1130 GMT:

The Ukraine military says another Russian general has been killed in fighting.

The military said Lt. Gen. Andrei Mordvichev, was commander of the 8th Combined Arms Army of the Southern Military District of the Russian Armed Forces.

The military also claimed anti-aircraft defenses hit 12 Russian targets: two planes, three helicopters, three drones, and four cruise missiles.

UPDATE 1104 GMT:

The Guardian reports from the city of Okhtyrka, near the frontline of the Russian advance in northeast Ukraine.

Before the invasion, about 48,000 people lived in Okhtyrka. Now after three weeks of Russian bombing, about 100 have been killed and half of the population has fled.

The train station is destroyed with some heavy freight wagons overturned. The town hall, a shopping center, and a local cultural center were obliterated. A single bomb demolished three houses, shattering the windows and balconies of two nine-story buildings 100 meters away.

The thermal power station has been partially repaired after a bombing, but residents struggle to stay warm with temperatures at -12C (10F) at night.

Mayor Pavlo Kuzmenko explains the Russian destruction of the city: “It’s because Okhtyrka did not surrender, and did not greet the Russians with flowers.” He said captured Russian troops told him thatt they had expected to be in Ukraine’s capital Kyiv within two days.

A surgeon by profession, Kuzmenko carried out operations in the opening days of the invasion. He maintains hope even as he tells The Guardian that “six people were killed here” and “three people there”: the final toll can be revealed “after the victory” over the Russian invaders.

Unfortunately, we have funerals every day. We do not have time to honor our people properly. They are buried quickly. Many civilians die.
The Russians thought that people would say “Putin, help!”, but we say “Putin, die!”

UPDATE 1100 GMT:

The Russian Defense Ministry says it has used a hypersonic weapon for the first time, destroying an underground military depot for missiles and aircraft ammunition in the Ivano-Frankivsk region in western Ukraine.

ORIGINAL ENTRY: As Russia’s ground offensive stalls in Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, analysts warn of a “strategy of attrition” with more deadly attacks on civilians.

UK defense intelligence summarized on Saturday:

The Kremlin has so far failed to achieve its original objectives. It has been surprised by the scale and ferocity of the Ukrainian resistance.
Russia has been forced to change its operational approach and is now pursuing a strategy of attrition. This is likely to involve the indiscriminate use of firepower resulting in increased civilian casualties, destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure, and intensify the humanitarian crisis.

On Friday Russian ground forces finally entered besieged Mariupol in southern Ukraine, the one area where Moscow’s forces have made notable gains, after almost three weeks of cutting off the city and denying aid to 350,000 residents.

Fighting was reported in the city center yesterday. The Russian Defense Ministry said its forces were “tightening the noose” around the residents with “fighting against nationalists”. Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boichenko, acknowledged that fighting was “very active”.

Meanwhile, the fate of hundreds of civilians, sheltering in the city’s theater which was destroyed by Russian shelling on Wednesday, is still unclear.

Boichenko said rescue teams can only work when fighting subsides: “There are tanks…and artillery shelling, and all kinds of weapons fired in the area. Our forces are doing everything they can to hold their position in the city, but the forces of the enemy are larger than ours, unfortunately.”

Outside the south, with its ground forces unable to advance, Russia continued shelling and aerial assaults on civilian areas. The Russians also carried out missile strikes in western Ukraine, striking an aircraft repair plant in Lviv, and killed at least 40 Ukrainian soldiers in an airstrike on an army barracks in Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine.

The UN said 816 civilians are confirmed to have been killed during the Russian invasion, with 1,333 people wounded. It cautioned that the actual figures are likely to be much higher.

Kyiv officials said 222 people had been slain in the capital, including 60 civilians and four children.

Zelenskiy: Time for Talks is Urgent

in an early-morning video address on Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the time for talks is urgent:

It’s time to meet. Time to talk. It is time to restore territorial integrity and justice for Ukraine. Otherwise Russia’s losses will be so huge that several generations will not be enough to rebound.

Zelenskiy noted that Russia is continuing to block the supply of aid to cities “in most areas”, although seven humanitarian corridors are operating — six in the Sumy region of northeast Ukraine and one in the Donetsk region in the east.

The governor of the Luhansk region, also in the east, said a humanitarian corridor for evacuation has been agreed from 9 a.m. local time on Saturday.

Serhiy Gaiday, governor of Ukraine’s Luhansk region, has said a humanitarian corridor for evacuation will be open on Saturday.

Noting the “war crime” of blocking aid, Zelenskiy thanks the defenders of Mariupol as the city experiences “the greatest ordeal in its history, in the history of Ukraine”. He repeated that only about 130 of those sheltering in the demolished city theater had been rescued: “Some of them are seriously wounded. But at the moment there is no information about the dead.”

Zelenskiy summarized that Russian forces have been halted elsewhere. While there has been heavy fighting in some ares, including near Ukraine’s second city Kharkiv, Russia’s troops had been unprepared.

Putin Poses at Staged Rally — With Help from Fox TV

In Moscow, Vladimir Putin postured at a staged rally promoting the war. He insisted, “The country hasn’t seen unity like this in a long time.”

State media proclaimed 200,000 people in and near the Lushniki Stadium, but observers noted that many of the attendees were State employees commanded to show up, with crowds leaving as soon as they had their tickets stamped.

One man told the BBC how he and others had been forced to participate: “I’ll be here for a while and then I’ll leave… I think most people here don’t support the war. I don’t.”

With Russian officials banning almost all independent media and threatening sentences of up to 15 years for reporting on the invasion, the UK defense ministry summarized, “The Kremlin is attempting to control the narrative, detract from operational problems, and obscure high Russian casualty numbers from the Russian people.”

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov noted that the Kremlin had a useful ally in the US outlet Fox TV. He said on the Russian State’s RT:

We know the manners and the tricks that are being used by the western countries to manipulate media….If you take the United States, only Fox News is trying to present some alternative point of view.

Last week, the US site Mother Jones revealed memos in which the Kremlin urged State channels to exploit Fox’s broadcasts:

It is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson

, who sharply criticises the actions of the United States [and] NATO, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine, [and] the defiantly provocative behavior from the leadership of the eastern countries and NATO towards the Russian Federation and towards President Putin, personally.

Carlson has fervently promoted the Kremlin’s disinformation of US “biological warfare labs” in Ukraine.

Ukraine War, Day 24: Russia’s “Strategy of Attrition” With “Increased Civilian Casualties”