LIVE – War in Ukraine: 220 children have been killed since the start of the conflict

Guest of BFMTV, the mayor of Mariupol Vadym Boytchenko indicated that “200 civilians” were still on the site of the Azovstal factory.

He also indicated that the Russians were blocking the advance of the first refugees towards Zaporizhia.

As the evacuation of the Azovstal factory, located in Mariupol, began, the first survivors, who often spent more than two months in the maze of the factory, began to recount the difficulties encountered during their life under earth.

Yelena, who left her house to take shelter at the factory in the first days of the war, recounted the difficulties of supply: “We thought we would stay there for one or two days, and in the end we had been there since the 24th February. The last month we were 40 and to eat we had 6 cans a day. With that, we prepared two buckets of soup”.

For Natalia, it was the fear of living under constant fire from Russian forces that was particularly difficult.

“The shelling was so strong, it was hard to breathe, I was afraid to go out. (…) When I came out, I said to my husband: ‘we will no longer have to go to the toilet with a lamp torch and a seal,'” she said.

But the most striking testimony remains that of Olga, this grandmother, sobbing alone in a bus. “I no longer have a house, all I have left is in these bags”.

On Tuesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry accused Israel of supporting “the neo-Nazi regime in kyiv” in a tweet, accompanied by a link redirecting to a text written in Russian titled “about anti-Semitism”. The text defends the idea that Jews would have collaborated with the Nazis before the Holocaust.

This publication marks a new stage in the diplomatic quarrel between Russia and the Jewish state. On Sunday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that “Hitler also had Jewish origins”, to reject the argument that Volodymyr Zelensky could not be a “Nazi” as Moscow claims because he is Jewish.

Ukrainian authorities announced on Tuesday that “more than 626 children have been affected in Ukraine since February 24”.

Also according to data transmitted by kyiv, 220 children were killed and 460 injured.

In a interview granted to the Italian newspaper Corriere della SeraPope Francis has indicated that he wants to go to Moscow to meet Vladimir Putin, a request which has not yet received a response from the head of the Kremlin.

“I am not going to kyiv at the moment. I have sent Cardinal Michael Czerny and Cardinal Konrad Krajewski. But I feel that I must not go there. First I must go to Moscow, first I must meet Putin,” he said.

He also said he spoke with Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, head of the Russian Orthodox Church. “I spoke to Kirill for forty minutes via Zoom. The first twenty minutes, (…) he read me all the justifications for the war [qu’il avait notées sur un carton]. I listened and said to him: ‘I don’t understand any of this. Brother, we are not state clerics, we cannot use the language of politics, but that of Jesus'”.

Guest of BFMTV on Monday evening, Captain Svyatoslav “Kalina” Palamar, deputy commander of the Azov regiment and entrenched under the Azovstal factory in Mariupol, indicated that the evacuation of civilians present on the site was interrupted.

“The evacuation of Azovstal is not continuing. It is even impossible because the territory is permanently under fire from tanks, missiles from the air force… Today the factory even burned down. huge fire,” he said.

Adding that “there are always around 200 civilians, including around 20 children” present.

Michael Carpenter, the US ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), said in an interview with CNN that Moscow plans to annex the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

“According to the latest information, we believe that Russia will try to annex the republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and attach them to Russia. Our information establishes that the Russians wish to carry out a referendum of membership by the mid-May,” said Michael Carpenter.

A similar operation could also take place in the Kherson region, he added.

On BFMTV on Tuesday, Julius, a Ukrainian volunteer working in a reception center in Zaporijia, returned to the reception conditions for people from Mariupol, while the first civilians are expected to leave the Azovstal factory.

“The people who will come from Mariupol, we offer them shelter, a place to sleep… We feed them, we give them clothes, and the possibility of continuing their journey,” he explained.

Adding that the path to reach Zaporizhia from Mariupol was very long due to the context.

“From Berdyansk to Zaporizhia, there are 17 checkpoints (…) My parents took three days, whereas normally it only takes three hours,” he said.

In their daily update, the intelligence services of the British Ministry of Defense assured that the Russian invasion of Ukraine had considerably weakened Moscow’s war machine.

“The Russian military is significantly weaker, both materially and conceptually, following the invasion of Ukraine. Sanctions will make it more difficult for it to recover. This will have a major impact on Russia’s ability to deploy conventional military troops,” the statement said.

British intelligence adds that Moscow’s inability to quickly win this war is due to “strategic errors as well as in the execution of operations”, making it “impossible to transpose numerical superiority as a decisive advantage”.

The European Union’s sixth sanctions package against Russia will include the withdrawal of “other banks” from the Swift transaction system, its high representative for foreign affairs, Josep Borrell, said on Monday in Panama.

These sanctions will concern “the banking sector, there will be other Russian banks that will come out of Swift”, and “in the energy sector, we are working to prepare proposals which make it possible to limit energy imports from Russia, in particular oil,” the diplomat said at a press conference.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson will address the Ukrainian Parliament by videoconference on Tuesday, a first for a Western leader since the start of the Russian invasion, and announce 300 million pounds of additional military aid to kyiv.

“This is your hour of glory,” he must tell Ukrainian MPs according to a statement from Downing Street published Monday evening.

“When my country was threatened with invasion in the Second World War, our Parliament, like yours, continued to meet during the conflict, and the British people showed such unity and determination that we remember our period of great peril as our hour of glory”, he must say during his speech scheduled around 11 a.m.

Welcome to this direct dedicated to the follow-up of the war in Ukraine.