Civilian targets in the besieged Ukrainian city Mariupol are being devastated by Russian strikes. Russian forces surrounded Mariupol a week ago, besieging the city, and shelling it continuously ever since.
Deputy Mayor of Mariupol Sergiy Orlov said that the scope of the besiegement is a war crime and “pure genocide.” He said that Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to capture Mariupol “whatever the human cost.”
There have been mounting warnings from the West that Russia’s ongoing invasion is going to take a brutal, indiscriminate turn.
On Wednesday, an airstrike destroyed a maternity hospital in the port city, which links Crimea with Russian-backed enclaves. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the world “an accomplice ignoring terror” following news of the hospital strike.
For more than a week, Mariupol’s people have suffered from a lack of access to food, water, and other basic human necessities. Eight days have now been spent without heat, power, electricity, or gas.
The death toll in Mariupol is rising. At least 1,170 people have been killed. In a grim mark of the week, municipal workers buried about 50 people in a mass grave and were unable to identify them all.
Orlov said that Putin is trying to “destroy Ukraine so that he can have Ukraine without Ukrainians.”
Mariupol is one of several cities in Ukraine that Putin has promised to set up so-called humanitarian corridors, but not into Europe, into Russia. But this city has not seen any sort of a corridor yet and instead has been locked in, with Russia continuing to shell the agreed-upon route and even putting mines on the road.
An estimated 200,000 civilians are looking to flee the city. Only 2,000 to 3,000 can be ushered out a day on a worn-down, battered fleet of 21 city buses.
Zelenskyy has reiterated calls for the West to set up a no-fly zone over Ukraine, but NATO continues to say that the potential fallout from this move would be “even more dangerous, destructive and deadly.”
Be the first to comment