Kherson
Chanting crowds of Ukrainians forced back Russian military trucks yesterday. The outburst in city of Kherson was the latest sign of defiance against President Putin’s invasion.
Acts of courage in the war so far include people leaping in front of tanks, pensioners berating Russian soldiers in the street and a man carrying a mine gingerly off a road. In Kherson, now under Russian occupation, demonstrators shouted “go home” as they advanced on trucks marked with the letter Z.
Waving Ukrainian flags, some shouted “Glory to Ukraine” as they bore down on the lead truck, which stopped and went into reverse. Others waved goodbye and jeered as the two vehicles pulled out of a central square. “Occupiers! Your parents, wives and children are waiting for you at home!” one banner said.
In Enerhodar in Zaporizhzhia region, where Russians have seized a nuclear power plant, locals held a protest calling for the release of Ivan Samoydyuk, the deputy mayor who was seized by Russian soldiers.
A crowd surrounded a group of uniformed men in a four-wheel drive vehicle and refused to back off when one of them began firing an automatic weapon in the air. Video footage of the incident was published by Dmitry Orlov, the mayor.
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Mariupol
Moscow was condemned last night after its forces allegedly bombed an art school where civilians were sheltering.
It is the second time in less than a week that Russian forces have been accused of attacking such targets.
Up to 400 people had taken refuge in the school in the shattered city of Mariupol, local officials said. The number of casualties was not yet known. “Peaceful civilians are still under the rubble,” Mariupol city council said, adding that the building in the city’s east had been destroyed.
Russia denied hitting the school or targeting civilians but the city is besieged and while some residents have been able to flee, reaching other parts of the country and relative safety, many remain trapped.
Last night Russia gave an ultimatum to the city’s defenders to surrender by this morning.
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“Lay down your arms,” Colonel General Mikhail Mizintsev, director of the National Centre for Defence Management, said in a briefing distributed by the defence ministry. “A terrible humanitarian catastrophe has developed. All who lay down their arms are guaranteed safe passage out of Mariupol.”
Mizintsev said that humanitarian corridors out of Mariupol would open at 10am Moscow time (7am GMT). Ukraine said that it would send 50 buses to evacuate civilians.
Ukraine rejected the Russian offer. Iryna Vereshchuk, a deputy prime minister, said: “There can be no talk of any surrenders, laying down of arms. We have already informed the Russian side about this. Instead of wasting time on eight pages of letters, just open a [humanitarian] corridor.”
“There is no city any more,” Marina Galla, a resident, said. She wept in the doorway of a crowded train compartment as it reached Lviv in the west.
Some of those with her carried only what they had at hand when they seized the chance to escape the relentless bombardment. Some fled so quickly that relatives still in the starving, freezing city on the Sea of Azov were unaware they had gone.
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Even as they finally fled Mariupol, aiming to reach trains heading west to safety, Russian soldiers at checkpoints made a chilling suggestion: it would be better to go to the Russian-occupied city of Melitopol or the Russian- annexed Crimean Peninsula instead.
Earlier this week, a Russian airstrike hit a theatre holding as many as 1,000 people. There were still no details on casualties, with rescue efforts hampered by shelling.
The Mariupol authorities say that nearly 10 per cent of the city’s population of 430,000 has fled over the past week. It is estimated that 2,300 people have died in the city and 40,000 are believed to have fled over the past week.
The city council alleged that thousands of residents had been taken to Russia against their will over the past week. Vadym Boichenko, the mayor of Mariupol, said that several thousand evacuees from the Left Bank area 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.
Greece’s consul-general in Mariupol, the last EU diplomat to leave, said last night that the city had joined the ranks of places destroyed by war. Manolis Androulakis has helped dozens of Greek citizens and ethnic Greeks to leave. He departed on Tuesday, taking four days to cross Ukraine, Romania and Moldova with a party of ten.
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“What I saw, I hope no one will ever see,” Androulakis said as he arrived at Athens International Airport and was reunited with his family. “Mariupol will become part of a list of cities that were completely destroyed by war; I don’t need to name them — they are Guernica, Coventry, Aleppo, Grozny, Leningrad,” Androulakis said.
President Zelensky said on Saturday that the siege of Mariupol was “a terror that will be remembered for centuries”.
Luhansk
At least 56 elderly people were reported 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, the 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 the 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.”
Denisova said the victims in Kreminna, in the east of the country, had “died on the spot”. Fifteen 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 responsible to be tried for war crimes.
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Serhiy Haidai, governor of Luhansk region, also said that the home had been attacked. “They just brought up a tank, put it opposite the building, and started firing,” he said. There was no immediate response from Russian officials or rebel authorities who control parts of Luhansk and Donetsk regions.
Kyiv
Five people were injured when a shell exploded outside an apartment block. Video showed a crater and burning cars by the building. A kindergarten was also damaged but was empty at the time.
Last night loud explosions were heard across the Ukrainian capital.
Zelensky ordered political action to be taken against Russian sympathisers and suspended the activities of 11 political parties. The largest is Opposition Platform for Life, which has 44 out of 450 seats in parliament. The party is led by Viktor Medvedchuk, a friend of President Putin, who is godfather to Medvedchuk’s daughter. Also on the list is the Nashi (Ours) party, led by Yevheniy Murayev. Before the invasion Britain warned that Russia wanted to install Murayev as the leader of Ukraine.
Speaking in a video address yesterday, Zelensky said that “given a large-scale war unleashed by the Russian Federation and links between it and some political structures, the activities of a number of parties is suspended for the period of the martial law”.
Kharkiv
The authorities in the eastern city of Kharkiv said that five people had been killed in recent shelling. A nine-year-old boy was one of the victims of an early-morning artillery strike.
A man was rescued from the rubble of a teaching building after it was shelled by Russia on Friday. The attack was reported to have killed one person and wounded several others.
Near the city, a family reported that a Russian rocket had landed in their kitchen and remained intact.
Lviv
Andriy Sadovy, the mayor, warned residents that saboteurs wearing red armbands were at work in the city close to the Polish border in the west.
