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WAR IN UKRAINE – On the 25th day of Russian invasion in Ukrainethe humanitarian situation is “catastrophic” this Sunday March 20 and is getting worse in major Ukrainian cities, still under fire from Russian strikes, while kyiv has called China, a strategic ally of Moscowto “condemn Russian barbarism”.
Russia announced on Sunday that it had used new hypersonic missiles and one of Europe’s largest steelworks is damaged in Mariupol.
Find below the latest developments on the ground of the war in Ukraine on the 25th day of fighting:
Evolution in the field
The Russian military bombed an art school serving as a refuge for several hundred people in Mariupol, southeastern Ukraine, local authorities charged on Sunday, adding that civilians were trapped under the rubble.
“Yesterday (Saturday), the Russian occupiers dropped bombs on the G12 art school located on the left bank of Mariupol, where 400 Mariupol residents – women, children and the elderly – had taken refuge” , said the municipality of this port city besieged by forces from Moscow.
“We know the building was destroyed and peaceful people are still under the rubble. The toll on the number of victims is being clarified,” she added in a statement posted on Telegram.
These statements could not immediately be independently verified.
In Mariupol, a city and strategic port in the south-east of Ukraine – bombarded for several weeks and suffering from a shortage of water, gas and electricity – families recounted the corpses lying on the streets for days, hunger, thirst and the biting cold of nights spent in cellars with sub-zero temperatures. zero degrees.
A group of 19 children, mostly orphans, are “in great danger” there, stranded in a sanatorium, their guardians unable to recover them due to the fighting, their relatives and witnesses told AFP on Saturday.
AFP
Inflicting “such a thing on a peaceful city (…) is an act of terror that will be remembered even in the next century,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a speech on Sunday. The siege of Mariupol “will go down in history for answering to war crimes”, he said.
In the north of the country, the mayor of Chernihiv, Vladislav Atroshenko, portrayed an “absolute humanitarian disaster” in his city. “The indiscriminate artillery fire in residential areas continues, dozens of civilians are killed, children and women,” he told television.
“There is no electricity, heating and water, the city’s infrastructure is completely destroyed”. In a bombed hospital, “operated patients lie in the corridors in a temperature of 10 degrees,” he said.
The strikes have not stopped either in kyiv, the capital, in Mykolaiv (south) and in Kharkiv, a large Russian-speaking city in the northwest, where at least 500 people have been killed since the start of the war, according to official figures. Ukrainians.
For the first time in this conflict, Russia said on Saturday that it had used in Ukraine un missile hypersonique, a type of weapon that defies all air defense systems, according to Moscow. In the west of the country, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Saturday that it had used the new “Kinjal” hypersonic missiles the day before to destroy an underground weapons warehouse.
“Ukraine has unfortunately become a testing ground for the entire Russian arsenal of missiles,” Ukrainian air force spokesman Yuri Ignat told the Ukrainska Pravda website.
This Sunday, Russia announced that it had again used this type of missile, this time to destroy a fuel reserve of the Ukrainian army in the south of the country.
“A large reserve of fuel was destroyed by ‘Kalibr’ cruise missiles fired from the Caspian Sea, as well as by hypersonic ballistic missiles fired by the ‘Kinjal’ aviation system from the airspace of Crimea,” said the Ministry of Defense in a press release, without specifying the date of this strike.
The Azovstal steel and metallurgical plant in Mariupol, one of the largest in Europe, was heavily damaged by shelling, Ukrainian officials said on Sunday.
“One of the biggest metallurgical factories in Europe is destroyed. The economic losses for Ukraine are immense,” said MP Lesia Vasylenko, who posted a video on her Twitter account showing thick columns of smoke rising from an industrial complex. Another MP, Serhiy Taruta, wrote on his Facebook page that Russian forces, besieging Mariupol, “virtually destroyed the factory”.
Azovstal Managing Director Enver Tskitishvili said in a video message posted on Telegram that his company took precautionary measures at the plant from the start of the Russian invasion on February 24 to prevent any damage to the plant. ‘environment.
“The coke oven batteries no longer represent a danger to the lives of the inhabitants. We also shut down the blast furnaces properly,” he said. “We will return to the city, rebuild and resurrect the business,” he promised, without specifying the extent of the damage.
The Azovstal factory in Mariupol belongs to the Metinvest group, controlled by Ukraine’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov.
For the British Ministry of Defence, Russia “has failed to take control of the airspace and relies heavily on ranged weapons launched from safety relative use of Russian airspace to strike targets in Ukraine,” he said in a statement.
According to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, Russian troops, whose progress on the ground has been much more difficult than expected in the face of fierce Ukrainian resistance, have carried out 291 missile strikes and 1,403 air raids since the start of the invasion. February 24.
Diplomacy and sanctions
Faced with the continuation of deadly bombardments and dragging on negotiations – the fourth round between kyiv and Moscow opened on Monday – the Ukrainian presidency urged Beijing to take a stand.
China, a strategic ally of Moscow and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, is one of the notable absentees, along with India, from the chorus of condemnations and sanctions that has befallen Russia.
“China can be an important part of the global security system if it makes the right decision to support the coalition of civilized countries and condemn Russian barbarism,” tweeted Mykhaïlo Podoliak, an adviser to Mr. Zelensky and one of the participants in the negotiations with Russia.
US President Joe Biden spoke with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on Friday to explain “the consequences if China provides material support to Russia”, according to the White House. But Xi Jinping maintained the ambiguity, limiting himself to stressing that military conflicts were “in no one’s interest”, according to Chinese television.
In New Delhi, it was Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida who urged India, a major buyer of Russian arms and oil, to step aside and condemn the invasion. His Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi, refrained from mentioning Ukraine, and the joint statement was limited to a call for “an immediate cessation of violence.”
In a video link with Bern, Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday blasted companies like the Nestlé group that continue to operate in Russia. He called on Switzerland to freeze the assets of Russian billionaires and those close to the Kremlin.
Australia, for its part, announced in a government statement on Sunday an embargo on its exports of alumina and aluminum ore to Russia, “which will limit its ability to produce aluminum”. a strategic material for the arms industry in particular.
Russia is 20% dependent on Australia for its aluminum ore needs, according to Canberra.
The human toll
The Ukrainian president said that 180,000 people had so far been able to flee from combat zones through humanitarian corridors. More than 3.3 million refugees have now fled Ukraine since the Russian invasion, the United Nations said, while nearly 6.5 million people are believed to be internally displaced.
Around 90% of those who fled are women and children. Ukrainian men aged 18 to 60 can indeed be called up and must remain in their country.
Olena Zelenska, wife of the Ukrainian president, called on the World Council of Churches, an organization representing 580 million Christians around the world, to help organize “real humanitarian corridors”.
AFP
“But the occupiers continue to block humanitarian aid, especially around sensitive areas. It’s a well-known tactic. (…) It is a war crime,” Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday.
According to the Ukrainian authorities, 6,623 people were evacuated through the humanitarian corridors Saturday, including 4,128 fleeing Mariupol and 1,820 fleeing kyiv.
Since February 24, more than 3.2 million Ukrainians have taken the road to exile, nearly two-thirds of them to Poland, sometimes only a stage before continuing their exodus.
See also on The HuffPost: In Ukraine, a tribute to the “109 dead children” since the beginning of the war