Mariupol today remains under fierce Russian bombardment, complicating efforts to rescue hundreds of people trapped in a bomb shelter under a destroyed theatre.
So far 130 people have been rescued, Ukraine’s Ombudsperson for human rights, Lyudmyla Denisova, said on Friday. “But according to our data, there are still more than 1,300 people in these basements, in this bomb shelter,” Denisova told Ukrainian television. “We pray that they will all be alive, but so far there is no information about them.”
The UN has warned that Ukraine’s food supply chains were at risk of collapsing, with warehouses empty and infrastructure destroyed. The UN’s World Food Programme Emergency Coordinator for the Ukraine crisis, Jakob Kern, said supply problems were particularly acute in besieged cities like Mariupol, where humanitarian convoys have not been able to enter. Around 200,000 people are believed to be trapped in the besieged city.
In other developments:
• Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, thanked Boris Johnson for British security support.
• At least 222 people killed in Kyiv since the invasion began.
• Ukrainian forces have counter-attacked in the country’s south, relieving Russian pressure and moving towards the city of Kherson.
• President Biden will warn President Xi of China not to provide Russia with military aid.
• Putin has called Turkey’s President Erdogan with a list of demands for peace.
Russian missiles that struck near the city of Lviv this morning destroyed an aircraft repair plant, local officials said. The city in western Ukraine has provided a safe haven for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians fleeing besieged cities, and the attack raised fears that the war could now spread west. Lviv, close to the Polish border, is also a vital supply hub between the EU and Ukraine.
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Sergey Lavrov, the Kremlin foreign minister, told Russia Today, a state media outlet, that western military aid shipments to Ukraine could be targeted by Russian forces, amplifying the risk of conflict between Moscow and Nato. Many of these shipments have been routed through Lviv.
In Kyiv, city authorities said today that at least 222 people had been killed by Russian attacks since the invasion began last month, including 60 civilians. The Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has remained in the city to rally his nation behind its defence and has been holding regular conversations with world leaders.
“Held regular talks with PM Boris Johnson,” President Zelensky tweeted today. “Informed about the heroic struggle of people against the Russian aggression. Grateful for the strong support, including in terms of security. We’re committed to strengthen the anti-war coalition & ensure peace in Ukraine.”
A Russian push west along the Black Sea coast towards the strategic city of Odesa appeared to have been rebuffed today, with Ukraine mounting a counter-attack that relieved the southern city of Mykolaiv. Ukrainian forces are now pushing towards Kherson, with residents of the city, occupied by Russian forces, saying they could hear Ukrainian artillery striking Russian targets. City inhabitants said they had seen Russian convoys heading south, in the direction of Crimea, over the past two days.
US President Joe Biden is to warn China’s President Xi off providing logistical or military support to Russia in a phone call planned for 1pm today. In an apparent shift in policy, state media in Beijing have begun reporting on civilians killed by Russian forces, contradicting the Kremlin narrative.
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President Putin last night called President Erdogan of Turkey, laying out a list of demands for peace. He is insisting on Ukraine’s neutrality, disarmament and “de-Nazification”, a controversial demand because it could require Ukraine’s president, who is Jewish, to accommodate Kremlin propaganda about his country.
Russian missiles struck an area near the airport in Lviv, western Ukraine, at 7.30am today.
The city’s mayor, Andriy Sadovyi, said a facility for repairing military aircraft near the international airport was hit. No casualties were immediately reported and the airport itself was not hit.
The facility had suspended work prior to the attack, Sadovyi said on the Telegram messaging app. The strike also damaged a bus repair workshop.
The attack on Lviv came as an official from the separatist Donetsk People’s Republic claimed that Russia had established a no-fly zone over the eastern Donbas region, according to the Interfax news agency.
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Meanwhile, Russia has struggled to resupply its forward troops with basic essentials such as food and fuel. Britain’s Ministry of Defence described the invasion as “faltering”.
The failure to seize control of the skies, and “incessant” Ukrainian counter-attacks, have severely hindered the Russian war machine, according to a British assessment. Ukraine is now counter-attacking east of Mykolaiv and around Kherson, which is in Russian hands.
The MoD said that Russia was having to divert a “large number” of troops to defend their own supply lines from Ukrainian raids. This is “severely limiting Russia’s offensive potential,” the MoD said.
Moscow is also pulling troops out of Armenia, South Ossetia in Georgia and eastern Russia to bolster its forces in Ukraine. The Japanese defence ministry said had seen four Russian warships carrying armoured vehicles sailing past its waters apparently on its way to Europe. Convoys have been seen heading west inside Russia from as far afield as Siberia.
Those findings echoed the Ukrainian military’s daily operational report, which said that Russia was compensating for a lack of manpower by importing foreign fighters.
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The report said that President Putin’s forces had summoned 1,000 volunteers from the “so-called army of Bashar al-Assad and Hezbollah” in Syria.
The main requirement for foreign militants is experience of fighting in cities, according to the Ukrainian military.
The Pentagon believes that Russia may have lost at least 7,000 troops, roughly half the Ukrainian estimate of almost 14,000 but still more than the number of US lives lost in Afghanistan and Iraq combined since 2001.
Oryx Blog, an online monitor which uses only open-source material to calculate losses, said that 230 Russian tanks were confirmed destroyed, abandoned, captured or otherwise lost.
If the numbers were correct, it would be the greatest loss of tanks by an army in a conflict since the Second World War.
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Russian forces are still being held both east and west of Kyiv, the capital, as well as in Kharkiv, the second city, despite a fierce bombardment.
However, the Institute for the Study of War, a US think tank, believes that Mariupol, a besieged city in the south that has so far resisted a ferocious onslaught, will likely fall “within the coming weeks”.
Elsewhere, the Kremlin today attacked President Biden’s “personal insults” aimed at President Putin, which they claimed were fuelled by irritation, fatigue and forgetfulness.
Biden has labelled Putin a “war criminal” and a “murderous dictator” in recent days.
“We hear and see statements that are actually personal insults to President Putin,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
“Given such irritability from Mr Biden, his fatigue and sometimes forgetfulness . . . fatigue that leads to aggressive statements, we will not make harsh assessments, so as not to cause more aggression.”
The war’s toll on the civilian population has continued to rise, with bodies hastily thrown in mass graves in some cities.
The United Nations said that it had recorded at least 726 confirmed civilian deaths since the invasion began, including 52 children, though officials said the true number is likely much higher.
“Most of these casualties were caused by the use in populated areas of explosive weapons with a wide impact area,” Rosemary A DiCarlo, the UN undersecretary for political and peace-building affairs, said.
About 3.2 million civilians have fled the conflict.
Moscow has denied targeting civilians and has claimed that the images of bombed-out buildings have either been manipulated or that the Ukrainians have attacked their own side to win sympathy.
Russian spokesmen have put foward a different account of the war, saying Ukraine had lost 180 military aircraft, and almost 1,400 tanks and armoured vehicles since the start of the Kremlin’s “special operation.” Moscow also claims to hav eliminated 177 drones.
Despite this, Russia has not achieved superiority in the skies above Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Russia is fighting a war on a second front as its government websites and state-run media outlets battle a barrage of cyberattacks from abroad.
The government’s Ministry of Digital Development and Communications said yesterday: “We are recording unprecedented attacks on the websites of government authorities. If their capacity at peak times reached 500GB earlier, it is now up to 1TB. That is, two to three times more powerful than the most serious incidents of this type previously recorded.”
