A woman stands in front of an apartment block destroyed by Russian shelling of besieged Mariupol in southern Ukraine, March 17, 2022 (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)
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Iran Supplies Russia’s Ukraine Invasion — Reports
Monday’s Coverage: Zelenskiy — “I Am Glad to Note That German Position Has Changed”
UPDATE 2100 GMT:
Ukraine authorities have rearrested pro-Russian politician Viktor Medvedchuk after he was apprehended by special forces.
Medvedchuk, the leader of the Opposition Platform — For Life Party, escaped from house arrest in February. He was charged with treason in May 2021, and the US said last month that the Russian military was planning to put him and his allies into power in Kyiv.
The politician claims Vladimir Putin is godfather to his daughter. He said of Putin last spring, “Our relationship has developed over 20 years.”
Ukraine President Zelenskiy published a photo of Medvedchuk in handcuffs. He later said, “I propose to the Russian Federation to exchange this guy of yours” for Ukrainian men and women held by the Russians.
UPDATE 2050 GMT:
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy rejected a request by German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to visit Kyiv alongside other European politicians on Wednesday.
Steinmeier is on a state visit in Poland. He had planned to travel to the Ukrainian capital with the presidents of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.
But Zelenskiy blocked the German President because he once had close ties to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Steinmeier, a former foreign minister, was also an ally of the ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who worked for the Russian oil giants Rozneft and Gazprom.
“We all here know Steinmeier’s close ties to Russia,” said a Ukrainian diplomat. “He is currently not welcome in Kyiv. We will see whether that will change one day.”
Steinmeier has been increasingly critical of Vladimir Putin, whom he called a “warmonger” last week. He said on Tuesday afternoon that he had wanted to travel to Kyiv “to send out a strong message of European solidarity with Ukraine”.
UPDATE 1710 GMT:
Donetsk governor Pavlo Kyrylenko says Russia is shelling the eastern Ukraine region round the clock.
Kyrylenko said Moscow is now in the final stages of regrouping forces in the area for a possible ground offensive.
Morgues in several cities in the neighboring region of Luhansk are full, says Serhiy Haidai, the head of the regional military administration.
Bodies also lie in basements. It is impossible to keep them, so during the quiet breaks from shelling, volunteers and utility workers bury the bodies in new designated places.
UPDATE 1645 GMT:
The World Bank is allocating $1.5 billion in financial support to Ukraine to keep critical services running.
The Bank said the funding will support the continuation of key government services such as wages for hospital workers, pensions for the elderly, and social programs for vulnerable people.
The Bank had already authorized $944m of emergency financing.
UPDATE 1550 GMT:
Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boichenko has updated the estimated toll in the city to about 21,000 civilians killed during the Russian invasion.
UPDATE 1545 GMT:
Russian authorities have sentenced prominent activist Vladimir Kara-Murza to 15 days in prison.
Kara-Murza’s lawyer Vadim Prokhorov said his client was arrested late Monday in Moscow on charges of disobeying police orders. He faces up to 15 days in jail or a small fine.
The activist launched an anti-war committee, alongside other leading opposition figures, amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Hours before his arrest, he told CNN:
I have absolutely no doubt that the Putin regime will end over this war in Ukraine, doesn’t mean it’s gonna happen tomorrow. The two main questions are time and price and by price, I do not mean monetary – I mean the price of human blood and human lives and it has already been horrendous, but the Putin regime will end over this and there will be a democratic Russia after Putin.
Kara-Murza, 40, says he was deliberately poisoned in 2015 and 2017, retaliating for his lobbying for US and EU sanctions against Russian officials accused of human rights abuses. In the first incident, the activist nearly died of kidney failure.
He was a close friend of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated in 2015.
UPDATE 1355 GMT:
Bucha Mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk says officials have recovered 403 bodies of people believed to have been killed by occupying Russian forces.
Fedoruk said the number is increasing as efforts continued in the liberated town, northwest of Kyiv.
The mayor said it is too early for residents to return.
UPDATE 1345 GMT:
Russian hackers tried to attack Ukraine’s power grid last week, say Ukrainian officials and cybersecurity researchers.
The group, “Sandworm”, tried to install destructive and data-wiping malware on computers controlling high voltage substations.
The initial attack was in February, and the second was last Friday. Ukrainian officials blocked the attempt.
The malware was an upgraded version of a malicious programme which caused power blackouts in Kyiv in 2016.
UPDATE 1330 GMT:
Addressing the Lithuanian Parliament, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has told European leaders that “we can’t wait” over tougher sanctions on Russia.
Zelenskiy said:
We need powerful decisions, and the EU must take them now. They must sanction oil and all Russian banks….
Each EU state must set terms for when they will refuse or limit (Russian) energy sources such as gas.
Only then will the Russian government understand they need to seek peace, that the war is turning into a catastrophe for them.
UPDATE 1323 GMT:
A British man fighting with Ukrainian forces in besieged Mariupol said his unit has been forced to surrender.
Aiden Aslin, who is from Nottinghamshire, is a marine in the Ukrainian military after moving to the country in 2018. His mother, Ang Wood, told the BBC:
He called me and said they have no weapons left to fight. I love my son. He is my hero. They put up one hell of a fight.
But he sounded okay. Boris [UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson] needs to take Putin down.
A friend said Aslin told him that the unit had no food, ammunition or supplies: “They can’t get out. They can’t fight back. So they had no choice.”
UPDATE 1305 GMT:
Russia is using cluster munitions in Ukraine, spreading bombs in civilian areas with up to 350 meters, according to the weapons monitor Airwars.
Airwars investigated a February strike on a hospital and blood donation center in Kharkiv that reportedly killed at least one person. It documented a total of 26 impact sites spanning 350 meters.
More than 100 countries have signed a UN convention banning the use of cluster munitions, although Russia, Ukraine, and the US are not signatories.
UPDATE 0925 GMT:
Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer said, following a 75-minute meeting with Vladimir Putin on Monday, that he is “not optimistic” over a diplomatic solution to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Nehammer, the first European Union leader to meet Putin since the February invasion, said, “Putin has massively arrived in a mindset whose logic is determined by war” — even as the Russian leader rejects the term “war” — “and is acting accordingly”.
Nehammer said, during the “direct, open and tough” conversation, that international sanctions will toughen as long as civilians are being killed in Ukraine: “I mentioned the serious war crimes in Bucha and other locations and stressed that all those responsible have to be brought to justice.”
Putin claimed the mass killings of Bucha’s civilians were Ukrainian false flag attacks.
At an awards ceremony in far southeastern Russia on Tuesday, Putin insisted that the invasion is justified:
Its goals are absolutely clear and noble. On the one hand, we are helping and saving people, and on the other, we are simply taking measures to ensure the security of Russia itself. It’s clear that we didn’t have a choice. It was the right decision.
UPDATE 0900 GMT:
Finnish telecoms equipment company Nokia is pulling out of the Russian market.
Chief executive Pekka Lundmark said, “We just simply do not see any possibilities to continue in the country under the current circumstances.”
UPDATE 0848 GMT:
Almost 2/3rds of Ukraine’s children are displaced amid Russia’s invasion, according to the UN children’s agency UNICEF.
Manuel Fontaine, UNICEF’s emergency programs director, said it is “quite incredible” that 4.8 million of 7.5 million children have fled their homes” so quickly. He added that he had not seen such a displacement in 31 years of humanitarian work.
Fontaine told the UN Security Council:
They have been forced to leave everything behind — their homes, their schools and, often, their family members. I have heard stories of the desperate steps parents are taking to get their children to safety, and children saddened that they are unable to get back to school.
Of the displaced, 2.8 million are in Ukraine and 2 million are in other countries. Almost half of the 3.2 million children still in their homes “may be at risk of not having enough food”.
The agency said 142 children have been killed, although the actual number is almost certainly much higher. The Ukraine Prosecutor General’s office has confirmed 183 slain children and 342 injured.
Ukraine’s Ambassador to the UN, Sergiy Kyslytsya, said Russia has taken more than 121,000 children out of the country. He said most were removed from the besieged city of Mariupol in southern Ukraine, transferred to Russian-proxy areas in Donetsk and then to the Russian city of Taganrog.
Fontaine said UNICEF has heard the same reports but “we don’t have yet the access that we need to have to be able to look and verify and see if we can assist”.
ORIGINAL ENTRY: The mayor of besieged Mariupol in southern Ukraine says more than 10,000 people have died amid the seven-week Russian assault and siege.
Officials, including Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, over a possible Russian resort to chemical weapons on Monday.
And Russia or its supporters may have pursued disinformation to portray an imminent surrender of Mariupol’s defenders.
Russian forces bombarded Mariupol, a port on the Sea of Azov, as soon as the invasion was launched on February 24. They established a siege while seizing a corridor along the Black Sea and Sea of Azov — their only notable success in the seven-week offensive.
With the Russians refusing to allow aid or organized evacuations, about 100,000 people remain in Mariupol. They have no water, heat, or electricity and food is scarce. Russian shelling has levelled most of the city, destroying a hospital and trapping hundreds of sheltering civilians in the rubble of the Drama Theater.
But still the city holds out against occupation.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Mayor Vadym Boychenko cited the death toll and said it could surpass 20,000, with bodies “carpeted through the streets”. Zelenskiy said tens of thousands are likely to have been killed, “but even despite this, the Russians are not stopping their offensive”.
Speaking by phone from Ukraine-controlled territory outside Mariupol, Boychenko said Russian forces took many bodies to a large shopping center with storage facilities and refrigerators:“Mobile crematoriums have arrived in the form of trucks: You open it, and there is a pipe inside and these bodies are burned.”
On Monday, the Azov Regiment, a unit of Ukraine’s National Guard, said a Russian drone had used chemical weapons of an “unknown origin”. Azov leader Andriy Biletsky told the Kyiv Independent that three people had signs of chemical poisoning; however, there were no apparent “disastrous consequences” for their health.
MP Ivanna Klympush said the unknown substance was “most likely” a chemical weapon. Zelenskiy expressed concern without confirming an attack.
Today, the occupiers issued a new statement, which testifies to their preparation for a new stage of terror against Ukraine and our defenders.
One of the mouthpieces of the occupiers stated that they could use chemical weapons against the defenders of Mariupol. We take this as seriously as possible.
UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said work has begun to verify details of the alleged attack: “Any use of such weapons would be a callous escalation in this conflict and we will hold Putin and his regime to account.”
US State Department spokesperson Ned Price said there is “credible information” that Russia may have been “preparing to use [chemical] agents” in areas such as Mariupol. Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said he was aware of the reports but “cannot confirm at this time”.
A Facebook post from Ukraine’s 36th Marine Brigade, said it was “pushed back” and “surrounded” by the Russians. Almost half of the brigade was wounded. With all infantry killed, defense was by artillerymen, anti-aircraft gunners, radio operators, drivers, cooks, and even orchestra members.
Later in the day, Ukraine’s military commander-in-chief, Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, said the defenders were still holding out.
Communication with the units of the defence forces heroically holding the city is stable and maintained.
We are doing the possible and impossible for the victory and the preservation of the lives of personnel and civilians in all directions. Believe in the Armed Forces of Ukraine!
