Russia Ukraine War: Officials in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol say the Russian military has bombed an art school where at least 400 people took refuge. Local officials said on Sunday that the school building was destroyed and people could be trapped under the rubble. It is not yet known whether there have been any casualties or not.
On Wednesday, the Russian military also bombed a theater in Mariupol, in which civilians were taking refuge. He said 130 people were rescued and some people may be trapped under the rubble.
Surrounded by Russian forces and most affected by the war, Mariupol has been pushed into the interior by Russian troops. The fierce fighting in Mariupol has led to the closure of a major steel plant and local authorities have called for more help from Western countries.
‘Mariupol’s name was erased from the earth’
Mariupol police officer Michael Vershnein, in a video addressed to Western leaders, showed a scene of rubble scattered on a road nearby, saying: “Children, elderly people are dying. The city has been destroyed and its traces wiped from the earth.” Is.”
A Ukrainian military official told The New York Times that information has also begun to emerge about a rocket attack in the southern city of Mykolaiv in the past, in which 40 marines were killed.
Russian forces have already cut off Mariupol’s contact with the Azov Sea. Vadim Denisenko, adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, said that Ukraine and Russian forces fought over the Azhovstal iron plant in Mariupol. “One of the biggest metallurgy plants in Europe is really falling apart,” Denisenko said on television.
‘Russian army shifted women and children’
Mariupol city council claimed shortly thereafter that Russian troops had forcibly relocated thousands of the city’s residents, mostly women and children, to Russia. However, he did not specify where the people were taken.
Oleksiy Erestovich, adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said that nearby forces assisting Mariupol were already struggling against “enormous enemy forces” and that ‘there is currently no military solution to Mariupol.’
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Zelensky said on Sunday morning that the siege of Mariupol would go down in history as a war crime committed by Russian soldiers.
The figures for the death of Russian soldiers in the war vary, but according to one estimate, thousands of Russian soldiers have died in this war. In 2008, 64 Russian soldiers were killed in five days of fighting during the war with Georgia. About 15,000 Russian soldiers were killed in 10 years in Afghanistan and over 11,000 in Chechnya during the years of fighting.
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