Iin the city Kharkiv At least five civilians have been killed in Russian artillery shelling in eastern Ukraine. Kharkiv police said a nine-year-old boy was among the victims of Sunday morning’s attack. Kharkiv has been besieged by Russian troops since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine.
Ukraine’s second largest city is under constant fire. According to local authorities, 266 civilians have been killed in fighting since Russian troops began invading Ukraine. Among them were 14 children, said the judicial authorities in the country’s second largest city on Saturday evening.
More and more people are enjoying the embattled port city Mariupol leaving. On Saturday, 4,128 people succeeded, wrote the deputy head of the Ukrainian presidential office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, on Telegram.
However, many of them are being taken to remote cities in Russia by the Russian invaders, apparently against their will. “Several thousand residents of Mariupol were transferred to Russian territory in the past week,” the city administration said in a statement.
“The occupiers illegally abducted people from the Livoberezhniy district and from the shelter of the sports club, where more than a thousand people, mostly women and children, were hiding from the constant bombing,” the city council said in a statement on its Telegram channel late Saturday evening with
People from Mariupol who managed to escape from the city through one of the corridors to the Zaporizhia region
Credit: AFP/EMRE CAYLAK
The Russian news agency TASS reported that 13 buses with more than 350 people on board were on their way to Russia. The Russian Defense Ministry announced this month that Russia had provided 200 buses for the “evacuation” of Mariupol citizens.
“The occupiers illegally took people from the Livoberezhny district and from a shelter in the sports club building, where more than a thousand people (mostly women and children) were hiding from the constant bombing.”
Residents of Mariupol on a bus
Source: REUTERS
The abducted residents of Mariupol were taken to camps where Russian forces checked their cellphones and documents. Some were then taken to remote cities in Russia, the statement said. The fate of the others is unknown.
“What the occupiers are doing today is familiar to the older generation who saw the horrific events of World War II, when the Nazis forcibly captured people,” Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boichenko said in the statement. “It is difficult to convey that people are forcibly taken to another country in the 21st century.”
The RIA Novosti agency reported last week, citing relief services, that nearly 300,000 people, including about 60,000 children, have arrived in Russia from the Luhansk and Donbass regions and Mariupol.
Mariupol: More attacks from the air
Meanwhile, the Russian troops are trying to take the city with brutal force. The attacks from the air and on land are relentless, Major Denis Prokopenko of the Azov regiment of the National Guard told US television channel CNN.
Mariupol is now under fire all day and all night. “Sometimes there is 30 minutes of silence, but then the city is again attacked by tanks, artillery, missiles, bombers and helicopters,” he said.
One of the targets on Wednesday was the city’s theater. A new satellite image now shows the consequences of the Russian air raid on it. The recording by Maxar Technologies released on Saturday shows that much of the theater was destroyed. In front of the building, the word “Children” can still be read in large white Russian letters.
The destroyed theater of Mariupol in a satellite image from Maxar Technologies. “deti” is written on the floor in front of the building, which means children
Source: AP
More than 1,400 people are said to have taken refuge in the basement of the building when it was attacked on Wednesday. The human rights commissioner of Ukraine’s parliament, Ludmyla Denisova, said on Friday that at least 130 people had been rescued alive. The rest are probably still in the basement under the rubble.
Should Mariupol be captured by the attackers, this would create a land bridge between the separatist-held areas around Donetsk and Luhansk and the Crimean peninsula annexed by Russia.
Source: Infographic WORLD
In a dramatic appeal, the mayor of Chernihiv also drew attention to the precarious situation in the northern Ukrainian city surrounded by Russian troops. “The indiscriminate artillery shelling of residential areas continues, peaceful people are dying,” said Vladislav Atrashenko, according to the Unian agency.
The city is experiencing a humanitarian catastrophe. “There is no electricity, no water, no heating, the city’s infrastructure is completely destroyed.”
The hospital in the city of 300,000 is also repeatedly shot at, which is why medical care has collapsed. In addition, no escape corridor has been set up for the city so far.
High number of victims in destroyed barracks in Mykolaiv
After a rocket attack by Russian troops on a barracks in Mykolayiv In southern Ukraine, helpers recovered at least 50 dead from the rubble on Saturday. A total of around 200 soldiers were sleeping in the building when the rockets hit, as Ukrajinska Pravda reported on Saturday.
Almost 60 injured were taken to nearby hospitals. According to Mayor Olexander Senkevich, the attack on Friday took place in the immediate vicinity of Mykolayiv, so it was not possible to sound the alarm in time. The information on the number of victims could not be independently verified.
Different figures for evacuees
In addition to the 4,128 people from Mariupol, almost 2,500 other civilians were able to escape, according to the Ukrainian Presidential Office Kyiv and Luhansk regions brought to safety via so-called escape corridors.
Source: WELT/Isabell Bischoff infographic
The Russian side reported in the evening about the evacuation of almost 16,400 people from the self-proclaimed People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and other parts of Ukraine to Russia. The Ministry of Defense in Moscow also said that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians had expressed the wish to be able to flee to Russia.