Ukraine Crisis Appeal: World Vision Emergency Communications specialist Brianna Piazza reports. Video / World Vision / Getty
Ukraine has rejected a demand from Russia that its besieged city Mariupol surrender by 5am (3pm, NZT), Moscow time, as the invading forces continue their brutal assault on population centres across the country.
Mariupol has suffered relentless bombardment and street fighting for days. Many of its residents are entirely without food, water or power. The situation on the ground has been described as "hell on earth".
Today the Russian Defence Ministry announced it would allow Ukrainians to evacuate the city unharmed, but only if it surrendered to them. The Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, said that was "not an option".
⚡️Ukraine rejects Russia's demand to surrender Mariupol.
Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk responded to Russia by stating that surrender is not an option. The letter from Russia’s Defense Ministry said it would only establish a humanitarian corridor if Mariupol surrenders.
— The Kyiv Independent (@KyivIndependent) March 20, 2022
Thousands of residents of Mariupol have been "forcibly taken" across the border into Russia, authorities in the besieged Ukrainian city said, as Kremlin propaganda showed "rescued" civilians thanking Moscow for saving them.
The city of almost half a million people has been cut off from energy, water supply and food deliveries for more than two weeks while Russia has been pounding it with airstrikes.
Russian forces have now entered and appear to be taking control of the battered but strategically important city.
People in parts of the city now under Russian control were "being illegally deported to enemy territory", Mariupol's City Hall said Sunday.
"People who are being forcibly evacuated to Russia are forced to hand over their Ukrainian passports and are given a piece of paper that has no legal power and it is not recognised anywhere in the world," it said.
A mother embraces her son who escaped the besieged city of Mariupol and arrived at the train station in Lviv, western Ukraine on Sunday, March 20, 2022. Photo / AP
Pavlo Kyrylenko, a local offical, said: "The occupiers are sending the residents of Mariupol to filtration camps, checking their phones and seizing their Ukrainian documents."
Zelenskyy denounces Russian bombing of school
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy denounced the Russian bombing of a school in Mariupol where civilians took refuge.
Speaking in a video address early Monday, Zelenskyy said about 400 civilians were taking shelter at the art school in the besieged Azov Sea port city when it was struck by a Russian bomb.
"They are under the rubble, and we don't know how many of them have survived," he said. "But we know that we will certainly shoot down the pilot who dropped that bomb, like about 100 other such mass murderers whom we already have downed."
Zelenskyy, who spoke to members of the Israeli parliament via video link on Sunday, thanked Israel for its efforts to broker talks with Russia. He praised Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett for trying to help "find a negotiation track with Russia ... so that we sooner or later start talking with Russia, possibly in Jerusalem." "It would be the right place to find peace if possible," he added.
The Ukrainian president also said that he had a call Sunday with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a "true friend of Ukraine," to discuss support for Ukraine during this week's summit of the Group of Seven and Nato.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaks from Kyiv, Ukraine, early Monday. Photo / AP
Zelenskyy said 7,295 Ukrainians were evacuated from zones of combat on Sunday, including nearly 4,000 from Mariupol. He also hailed people in the southern city of Kherson for taking to the streets Sunday to protest the Russian occupation, showing "Ukrainian courage, armless against the occupiers."
Russia sets 5am deadline for Mariupol surrender
Russia has made an ultimatum and given Ukrainian forces until 5am Moscow time (3pm in New Zealand) to surrender Mariupol.
"Lay down your arms," Colonel-General Mikhail Mizintsev, the director of the Russian National Center for Defense Management, said in a briefing distributed by the defence ministry, according to Reuters.
"A terrible humanitarian catastrophe has developed. All who lay down their arms are guaranteed safe passage out of Mariupol," he added.
"The Mariupol authorities now have the opportunity to make a choice and go over to the side of the people, otherwise the military tribunal that awaits them is just a little that they deserve for their terrible crimes, which the Russian side is very carefully documenting."
Russian state television showed interviews with residents blaming the destruction on Ukrainian nationalists and thanking Russian forces for liberating them.
"They set major supermarkets on fire … They are real maniacs," one woman alleged of Ukrainian far-Right groups. Vladimir Putin has insisted the invasion is an attempt to "de-Nazify" Ukraine.
In another clip, a woman presented as leaving Mariupol for Russia is seen wiping away tears with freshly manicured nails - in the colours of the Russian flag - despite complaining of being without water or power supply for more than two weeks.
"What did we do to deserve this?" an unnamed woman said as she sat in a car with family members. Other women who spoke to the state Rossiya-1 channel were strikingly well-groomed after spending weeks under siege.
Mariupol, a strategic port on the Azov Sea, has seen the greatest damage of any Ukrainian city since Russia invaded last month.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, in his nightly address to the nation on Saturday, described the Russian onslaught on the city as a "terror that will be remembered for centuries to come".
Authorities in Russian-occupied Crimea, which appeared to be the primary destination for Mariupol residents evacuated from the city, said on Sunday they had received over 11,000 people in the past four days.
A mother embraces her son who escaped the besieged city of Mariupol and arrived at the train station in Lviv, western Ukraine on Sunday, March 20, 2022. Photo / AP
Mariupol's authorities said on Sunday morning that almost 40,000 people were able to flee the city in the past 24 hours via a humanitarian corridor towards western Ukraine.
Russian propaganda shows firing of thermobaric rockets that can melt organs
Russia has deployed TOS-1a Heavy Flamethrower Launches, discharging rockets that can melt human organs, Russian propaganda shows.
Video clips released by Russia Today show dozens of missiles being fired from on top of a tank.
They can be seen soaring through the air before smashing on the ground, leaving flames and a trail of smoke behind them.
Another clip, posted by the People's Militia of the Donetsk People's Republic, shows soldiers loading the rockets onto the back of tanks before they are ignited and fired.
The video was filmed in Mariupol, according to its narration.
"The DNR's People's Militia with support of the Russian armed forces during a special operation in Ukraine are targeting positions of nationalists around Mariupol with the help of the TOS-1a," it says.
Mariupol has been under siege for almost three weeks. The southern port city looks set to fall to Vladimir Putin within days.
The rockets, also known as vacuum bombs, suck in oxygen from the surrounding air to generate a high-temperature explosion. They typically produce a blast wave of a significantly longer duration than that of a conventional explosive.
The resultant supersonic blast destroys buildings with a devastating pressure wave that can crush human bodies even if they are not in the immediate vicinity of the strike.
Those close by are likely to suffer burst eardrums and crushed inner ear organs, severe concussions, ruptured lungs and internal organs, and possibly blindness, according to the CIA.
They are particularly useful for targetting bunkers as they cause people there to suffer from oxygen loss.
Ukraine's ambassador to the US said on February 28 that Russia had used the banned bombs.
On March 10, Russia confirmed the use of vacuum bombs, according to the Ministry of Defence (MoD).
The MoD said its Russian counterpart had confirmed the use of thermobaric rockets creating "incendiary and blast effects" in the invasion.
Ukrainian authorities said the Russian military bombed an art school where about 400 people had taken refuge in the port city of Mariupol, where President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said an unrelenting siege 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. Russian forces on Wednesday also bombed a theatre in Mariupol where civilians were sheltering, authorities have said.
"To do this to a peaceful city, what the occupiers did, is a terror that will be remembered for centuries to come," Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address to the nation.
Zelesnkyy also said that he's "ready for negotiations" with Putin but warned that, if they fail, "that would mean that this is a third World War".
Mariupol, a strategic port on the Azov Sea, has been under bombardment for at least three weeks and become a symbol of the horror of Russia's war in Ukraine. Local authorities have said the siege has cut off food, water and energy supplies, and killed at least 2,300 people, some of whom had to be buried in mass graves.
Medical staff rest in a basement used as a bomb shelter at the Ohmatdyt children's hospital in Kyiv, Ukraine. Photo / AP
Russian forces have surrounded the battered city and pushed deeper into it in recent days. Heavy fighting shut down a major steel plant and local authorities pleaded for more Western help.
"Children, elderly people are dying. The city is destroyed and it is wiped off the face of the earth," Mariupol police officer Michail Vershnin said from a rubble-strewn street in a video addressed to Western leaders that were authenticated by The Associated Press.
Putin 'agrees to meet Zelenskyy' - reports
Putin has reportedly "finally agreed" to meet in person with Volodymyr Zelensky for peace talks.
Speaking to BBC's Broadcasting House, BBC correspondent Lyse Doucet said the two leaders will meet "at some point".
"The diplomats are talking, the negotiators are talking," she said.
"And we understand they are making progress. And we understand President Putin has finally agreed that he will meet, at some point, President Zelensky who has been asking for a meeting since January.
"He hasn't said it in public, he says quite the opposite in public."
Zelenskyy also said this weekend that Russia will "go down in history of responsibility for war crimes", following the siege of the southern port city of Mariupol, which has been the target of air strikes and missiles for weeks.
"To do this to a peaceful city... is a terror that will be remembered for centuries to come," Zelenskyy said.
The fall of Mariupol, the scene of some of the war's worst suffering, would mark a major battlefield advance for the Russians, whose advance is largely stalled outside other major cities more than three weeks into the biggest land invasion in Europe since World War II.
In the capital, Kyiv, at least 20 babies carried by Ukrainian surrogate mothers are stuck in a makeshift bomb shelter, waiting for parents to travel into the war zone to pick them up. Some just days old, the babies are being cared for by nurses who cannot leave the shelter because of constant shelling by Russian troops who are trying to encircle the city.
Details also began to emerge about a rocket attack that killed as many as 40 marines in the Black Sea port city of Mykolaiv, according to a Ukrainian military official who spoke to The New York Times. It wasn't clear how many marines were inside at the time, and rescuers continued searching the rubble of the barracks.
A senior Ukrainian military official, who spoke to the Times on condition of anonymity to reveal sensitive information, estimated that as many as 40 marines were killed, which would make it one of the deadliest known attacks on Ukrainian forces during the war.
Meanwhile, the Russian military reported that it had carried out a new series of strikes on Ukrainian military facilities with long-range hypersonic and cruise missiles.
The Russian Defense Ministry's spokesman, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said a Kinzhal hypersonic missile hit a Ukrainian fuel depot in Kostiantynivka, a city near Mykolaiv. The Russian military said Saturday that it used a Kinzhal for the first time in combat to destroy an ammunition depot in Diliatyn in the Carpathian Mountains in western Ukraine.
Russia has said the Kinzhal, carried by MiG-31 fighter jets, has a range of up to 2,000 kilometres and flies at 10 times the speed of sound. Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said Saturday that the U.S. couldn't confirm the use of a hypersonic missile in Ukraine.
Konashenkov said Kalibr cruise missiles launched by Russian warships from the Caspian Sea were also involved in the strike on the fuel depot in Kostiantynivka and were used to destroy an armour repair plant in Nizhyn in the Chernihiv region in northern Ukraine.
Despite the siege in Mariupol and the geographic scope of Russia's assault, many remained struck by Ukraine's ability to hold back its much bigger, better-armed foe. The United Kingdom's Defense Ministry said Ukraine's airspace continued to be effectively defended.
"Gaining control of the air was one of Russia's principal objectives for the opening days of the conflict and their continued failure to do so has significantly blunted their operational progress," the ministry said on Twitter.
Russia is now relying on stand-off weapons launched from the relative safety of Russian airspace to strike targets within Ukraine, the British ministry said.
A man stands in front of a bomb shelter in Lviv, Western Ukraine. Photo / AP
Estimates of Russian deaths vary widely, but even conservative figures are in the low thousands. Russia had 64 deaths in five days of fighting during its 2008 war with Georgia. It lost about 15,000 in Afghanistan over 10 years, and more than 11,000 in years of fighting in Chechnya.
Russia's number of dead and wounded in Ukraine is nearing the 10% benchmark of diminished combat effectiveness, said Dmitry Gorenburg, a researcher on Russia's security at the Virginia-based CNA think tank. The reported battlefield deaths of four Russian generals — out of an estimated 20 in the fight — signal impaired command, Gorenburg said.
Russia would need 800,000 troops — almost equal to its entire active-duty military — to control Ukraine long-term in the face of the armed opposition, said Michael Clarke, former head of the British-based Royal United Services Institute, a defence think tank.
"Unless the Russians intend to be completely genocidal — they could flatten all the major cities, and Ukrainians will rise up against Russian occupation — there will be just constant guerrilla war," said Clarke.
U.N. bodies have confirmed more than 847 civilian deaths since the war began, though they concede the actual toll is likely much higher. The U.N. says more than 3.3 million people have fled Ukraine as refugees.
Evacuations from Mariupol and other besieged cities proceeded along with eight of 10 humanitarian corridors that Ukraine and Russia agreed to Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said, and a total of 6,623 people left.
Vereshchuk said planned humanitarian aid for the southern city of Kherson, which Russia seized early in the war, could not be delivered because the trucks were stopped along the way by Russian troops.
Ukraine and Russia have held several rounds of negotiations aimed at ending the conflict but remain divided over several issues, with Moscow pressing for its neighbour's demilitarization and Kyiv demanding security guarantees.
Around Ukraine, hospitals, schools and buildings where people sought safety have been attacked.
A satellite image from Maxar Technologies released Saturday confirmed earlier reports that much of the theatre in Mariupol was destroyed. It also showed the word "CHILDREN" written in Russian in large white letters outside the building.
Russian forces fired on eight cities and villages in the eastern Donetsk region between Friday and Saturday, Ukraine's national police said. Dozens of civilians were killed or wounded, and at least 37 residential buildings and facilities were damaged including a school, a museum and a shopping centre.
In the western city of Lviv, Ukraine's cultural capital, which was hit by Russian missiles on Friday, military veterans were training dozens of civilians on how to handle firearms and grenades.
"It's hard, because I have really weak hands, but I can manage it," said one trainee, 22-year-old Katarina Ishchenko.
The Mariupol city council claimed Saturday that Russian soldiers had forcibly relocated several thousand city residents, mostly women and children, to Russia. It didn't say where, and AP could not immediately confirm the claim.
Zelenskyy adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said the nearest forces that could assist Mariupol were already struggling against "the overwhelming force of the enemy" and that "there is currently no military solution to Mariupol."
Zelenskyy on Sunday ordered 11 political parties with links to Russia, the largest of which has 44 out of 450 seats in the country's parliament, to suspend activities during the period of martial law.
"Activities by politicians aimed at discord and collaboration will not succeed," he said in the address.
