ZAPORIZHZHIA,Ukraine (AP) — New satellite images show what appear to be mass graves near Mariupol, and local officials accused
The images emerged Thursday, just hours after Russian President
Satellite image provider
Mariupol Mayor
The graves could hold as many as 9,000 dead, the
Boychenko labeled Russian actions in the city as “the new Babi Yar,” a reference to the site of multiple Nazi massacres in which nearly 34,000 Ukrainian Jews were killed in 1941.
“The bodies of the dead were being brought by the truckload and actually simply being dumped in mounds,” an aide to Boychenko,
There was no immediate reaction from the Kremlin. When mass graves and hundreds of dead civilians were discovered in Bucha and other towns around
In a statement,
After nearly two lethal months of bombardment that largely reduced Mariupol to a smoking ruin, Russian forces appear to control the rest of the strategic southern city, including its vital but now badly damaged port.
But a few thousand Ukrainian troops, by
Ukrainian officials have repeatedly accused
At least two Russian attacks on Thursday hit the city of Zaporizhzhia, a way station for people fleeing Mariupol. No one was wounded, the regional governor said.
Among those who arrived in Zaporizhzhia after fleeing the city were Yuriy and Polina Lulac, who spent nearly two months living in a basement with at least a dozen other people. There was no running water and little food, Yuriy Lulac said.
“What was happening there was so horrible that you can’t describe it,” said the native Russian speaker who used a derogatory word for the Russian troops, saying they were “killing people for nothing.”
“Mariupol is gone. In the courtyards there are just graves and crosses,” Lulac said.
The
“In the courtyard, there was a little cemetery, and we buried seven people there,” Antipenko said, wiping away tears.
Instead of sending troops to finish off the Mariupol defenders inside the steel factory in a potentially bloody frontal assault,
All told, more than 100,000 people were believed trapped with little or no food, water, heat or medicine in Mariupol, which had a prewar population of about 430,000. Over 20,000 people have been killed in the siege, according to Ukrainian authorities.
The city has seized worldwide attention as the scene of some of the worst suffering of the war, including deadly airstrikes on a maternity hospital and a theater.
Boychenko rejected any notion that Mariupol had fallen into Russian hands.
“The city was, is and remains Ukrainian,” he declared. “Today our brave warriors, our heroes, are defending our city.”
The capture of Mariupol would represent the Kremlin’s biggest victory yet of the war in
At a joint appearance with Russian Defense Minister
Shoigu predicted the Azovstal steel mill could be taken in three to four days. But Putin said that would be “pointless" and expressed concern for the lives of Russian troops in deciding against sending them in to clear out the sprawling plant, where the die-hard defenders were hiding in a maze of underground passageways.
Instead, the Russian leader said, the military should “block off this industrial area so that not even a fly comes through.”
The plant covers 11 square kilometers (4 square miles) and is threaded with some 24 kilometers (15 miles) of tunnels and bunkers.
“The Russian agenda now is not to capture these really difficult places where the Ukrainians can hold out in the urban centers, but to try and capture territory and also to encircle the Ukrainian forces and declare a huge victory,” retired British Rear Adm.
Russian officials for weeks have said capturing the mostly Russian-speaking Donbas is the war’s main objective. Moscow’s forces opened the new phase of the fighting this week along a 300-mile (480-kilometer) front from the northeastern city of Kharkiv to the
While
A senior
Rockets struck a neighborhood of Kharkiv on Thursday, and at least two civilians were burned to death in their car. A school and a residential building were also hit, and firefighters tried to put out a blaze and search for anyone trapped.
Elsewhere, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister
Vereshchuk also said efforts to establish three humanitarian corridors in the Kherson region failed Thursday because Russian troops did not hold their fire.
In the
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