Ukraine has claimed that more than 50 elderly people were killed in “a horrific act of genocide” at a care home after a Russian tank fired at the building.
The allegation, which could not be independently verified, was made by Lyudmyla Denisova, Ukraine’s human rights ombudswoman, in a report on her Telegram channel.
“Today it became known about another terrible crime against humanity committed by the racist occupation forces — the shooting of 56 elderly people in Luhansk region,” she wrote. “In the town of Kreminna on March 11, the Russian occupiers cynically and purposefully fired from a tank at a home for the elderly.”
The claim followed growing anger about Russian artillery and airstrikes hitting residential areas, including a school and a theatre in Mariupol where hundreds of women and children were said to be among those taking refuge.
In other developments:
• Ukraine sees a high risk of an attack on western Volyn region being launched from Belarus.
• Rishi Sunak rejected the prime minister’s comparison of Ukraine war with Brexit vote.
• Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said Moscow expected its operation in Ukraine to end with the signing of a comprehensive agreement on security issues, including Ukraine’s neutral status.
• At least five civilians were killed in latest shelling in Kharkiv.
• Ten million people have now fled their homes in Ukraine due to Russia’s “devastating” war, the United Nations refugees chief said earlier today.
• The Pope has denounced Russia’s “repugnant war” against Ukraine as “cruel and sacrilegious inhumanity.”
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Denisova said the 56 elderly victims in Kreminna, in the east of the country, had “died on the spot” on March 11 while 15 survivors were “abducted” and taken to an institution in Svatove, a town in “occupied territory”.
“It is still impossible to get to the site of the tragedy to bury the dead old people,” she added, calling for those who were responsible to be tried for war crimes.
Serhiy Haidai, governor of Luhansk region, made the same claim about the alleged attack on the care home. Haidai said: “They just brought up a tank, put it opposite the building, and started firing.”
There was no immediate response from Russian officials or rebel authorities who control parts of Luhansk and Donetsk regions in eastern Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the city council of the besieged port of Mariupol, which has been pounded by Russian artillery and airstrikes, alleged that thousands of residents had been taken to Russia against their will in the past week.
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Vadim Boichenko, the mayor of Mariupol, said several thousand evacuees from the Left Bank area of the city, and from a bomb shelter where 1,000 mostly women and children were hiding, had been taken to “filtration camps” where their phones and documents were checked, after Russian troops overran the area.
Denisova said the evacuees were then dispatched to the Russian city of Taganrog, 70 miles to the east, “and from there sent by rail to various economically depressed cities in Russia”.
“Our citizens have been issued papers that require them to be in a certain city,” she added. “They have no right to leave it for at least two years with the obligation to work at the specified place of work. The fate of others remains unknown.”
“They’re taking Ukrainian citizens, sending them through what are called filtration camps, and then relocating them to distant parts of Russia to work for free,” Inna Sovsun, a Ukrainian MP, claimed in an interview with Times Radio. “This is the logic of Nazi Germany.”
Boichenko said: “It is hard to imagine that in the 21st century people will be forcibly deported to another country.”
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Russia claimed yesterday that 2.7 million Ukrainians wanted to be evacuated to Russia.
Thousands of evacuees have fled to the Ukrainian side from Mariupol, but Russia says it has helped about 3,000 people escape.
RIA Novosti, the Russian state news agency, said today that residents of Mariupol had been evacuated to a village in the separatist, pro-Moscow Donetsk People’s Republic, which borders Russia, in the past two days.
Later it reported that 480 residents of Mariupol, including 91 children, had arrived by train in the Russian city of Yaroslavl near Moscow, and would be housed at a sanatorium. One of the evacuees was quoted as saying it was his dream to live in Russia and he planned to stay and find a job.
Another train with about 20 carriages of Mariupol residents had departed Taganrog for the city of Ryazan, RIA said.
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Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the United Nations, said she was disturbed by the reports of forced deportation. “I’ve only heard it. I can’t confirm it,” she told CNN. “But I can say it is disturbing. It is unconscionable for Russia to force Ukrainian citizens into Russia and put them in what will basically be concentration and prisoner camps.”
Ukraine also accused the Russian military of bombing an art school which was being used a shelter by about 400 people in Mariupol. President Volodymyr Zelensky said that the unrelenting attacks by Russian troops would go down in history for what he said were war crimes.
Local authorities said the school’s building was destroyed and people could remain under the rubble. There was no immediate word on casualties.
The attack comes amid reports of fighting on the streets in the city centre, and after a theatre, which was also being used as a refuge by civilians, was hit in a Russia airstrike on Wednesday.
City authorities said 130 people were rescued but many more could remain under the debris. A Russian airstrike hit the maternity ward of a hospital in Mariupol earlier in the war.
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“To do this to a peaceful city, what the occupiers did, is a terror that will be remembered for centuries to come,” Zelensky said in a video address to the nation.
Mariupol, a strategic port on the Azov Sea, has been encircled by the Russian troops, cut from energy, food and water supplies and faced a relentless bombardment. Local authorities have said the siege has killed at least 2,300 people and some of them had to be buried in mass graves.
Access to the city is severely restricted and only a handful of aid convoys have been allowed in.
The fall of Mariupol, the scene of some of the war’s worst suffering, would mark a major battlefield advance for the Russians, who are largely bogged down outside major cities more than three weeks into the biggest land invasion in Europe since the Second World War.
Russia struck Ukrainian targets with cruise missiles fired from ships in the Black and Caspian Seas, and launched hypersonic missiles from Crimean airspace, the Russian Defence Ministry said this morning.
Olha Stefanishyna, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, said Russian forces had waged “nearly all possible war crimes that humanity has seen”. Their military had killed “far more” civilians than Ukrainian soldiers, she said.
Moscow’s siege of Mariupol was “a terror that will be remembered for centuries to come,” she added, as she urged the West to work with countries across Asia to keep up the pressure on Russia.
Stefanishyna also insisted that Ukraine would “absolutely not” agree to cede any territory to Russia in peace talks with Moscow. The Kremlin has claimed the negotiations are “half-way” to finding an agreement to end the war.
Asked if she believed Russia’s attacks on cities across Ukraine amounted to genocide, Stefanishyna told the Sophy Ridge on Sunday show on Sky News: “I absolutely believe it. I am a lawyer myself and I commit myself to implementation of the decision.”
She added: “It’s really important that all political leaders around the world from US to the European Union and Asia will stay united and establish the anti-war coalition, this joint effort will allow us to prevent this massive genocide and murdering in the 21st century.
David Cameron has said that the West must be “permanently ratcheting up the sanctions” on Russia until it ends its war in Ukraine. The former prime minister has returned from a three-day trip delivering humanitarian aid to refugees in Poland.
Speaking to Times Radio during his return journey, which was delayed due to a flat tyre, Cameron said western allies must “keep doing everything we can” to both help the Ukrainian army and punish Moscow.
Air Marshal Philip Osborn, the UK’s former head of defence intelligence, said Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is “pretty demoralised, pretty stuck and pretty stalled”.
He told Sky News that Russian forces were “demoralised because they were poorly prepared and proven to be inadequate”, and are now stalled because they have “lost momentum”.
He added: “We are seeing them pull resources and manpower from across Russia, even from Syria, and that is not a good indication for a supposed superpower. They are stalled because they are running out of options.
“Really what is left to them now is to double down on brute force to put pressure on the Ukrainian government.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has killed thousands of people, displaced more than 3 million and raised fears of a wider confrontation between Russia and the United States, the world’s two biggest nuclear powers.
The US Patriot air defence system has been deployed to Slovakia, a Nato member, from countries in the alliance. The system will be operated by German and Dutch troops and will initially be deployed at the Sliac airport in central Slovakia to help reinforce the defence of Nato’s eastern flank.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted the alliance to bolster its defences. The Patriot system will be part of a new Nato battlegroup in Slovakia, which has a border with Ukraine.
Russia has warned against any shipments of advanced air defences to Ukraine and has said that it may target western arms supplies.
In Poland, officials say that trucks headed for Belarus are backed up for 25 miles while they wait to reach the Koroszczyn border point as a group of protesters is blocking the road there. The protesters are calling for a ban on trade with Russia and its ally Belarus.
The protesters, Ukrainians and Poles, have been blocking access to the crossing — on and off — for some two weeks, to pressure Moscow into ending its war on Ukraine.
About 950 trucks are waiting to cross into Belarus, according to Michal Derus, a spokesman for the local tax office. The waiting time was 32 hours, he said.
