“The city was, is and remains Ukrainian,” he declared. Boychenko rejected any notion that Mariupol had fallen into Russian hands. 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 theatre. Over 20,000 people have been killed in the siege, according to Ukrainian authorities. Instead of sending troops to finish off the Mariupol defenders inside the steel factory in a potentially bloody frontal assault, Russia apparently intends to maintain the siege and wait for the fighters to surrender when they run out of food or ammunition.Īll told, more than 1,00,000 people were believed trapped with little or no food, water, heat or medicine in Mariupol, which had a prewar population of about 4,30,000. “In the courtyard, there was a little cemetery and we buried seven people there,” Mr. Dmitriy Antipenko said he lived mostly in a basement with his wife and father-in-law amid death and destruction. The Red Cross said it had expected to evacuate 1,500 people by bus, but that the Russians allowed only a few dozen to leave and pulled some people off of the buses. In the courtyards there are just graves and crosses,” 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. There was no running water and little food, Yuriy Lulac said. No one was wounded, the regional governor said.Īmong 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. At least two Russian attacks on Thursday hit the city of Zaporizhzhia, a way station for people fleeing Mariupol. Ukrainian officials have repeatedly accused Russia of launching attacks to block civilian evacuations from Mariupol.

About 1,000 civilians were also trapped there, according to Ukrainian officials. 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.īut a few thousand Ukrainian troops, by Moscow's estimate, have stubbornly held out for weeks at the steel plant, despite a pummelling from Russian forces and repeated demands for their surrender. In a statement, Maxar said a review of previous images indicates that the graves in Manhush were dug in late March and expanded in recent weeks. When mass graves and hundreds of dead civilians were discovered in Bucha and other towns around Kyiv after Russian troops retreated three weeks ago, Russian officials denied that their soldiers killed any civilians there and accused Ukraine of staging the atrocities. There was no immediate reaction from the Kremlin.

Boychenko, Piotr Andryushchenko, said on Telegram. “The bodies of the dead were being brought by the truckload and actually simply being dumped in mounds,” an aide to Mr. Boychenko labelled 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.

Hard west graves