ANDRIIVKA, Ukraine (AP) — The mayor of the besieged port city of Mariupol on Wednesday put the number of civilians killed there at more than 5,000, as Ukraine gathered evidence of Russian atrocities outside kyiv and braced for what might become a climactic battle. for control of the country’s industrial east.
Ukrainian authorities continued to round up the dead in ruined towns outside the capital amid telltale signs that Moscow troops killed civilians indiscriminately before withdrawing in recent days.
In other developments, the US and its Western allies moved to impose new sanctions against the Kremlin for what they called war crimes.
And Russia has completed the withdrawal of all of its estimated 24,000 or so troops from the kyiv and Chernihiv areas in the north, sending them to Belarus or Russia to resupply and reorganize, said a US defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned that Moscow is now mustering reinforcements and trying to push deeper into the country’s east, where the Kremlin has said its goal is to “liberate” the Donbas, Ukraine’s industrial heartland, mostly from speak Russian.
“The fate of our land and our people is being decided. We know what we are fighting for. And we will do everything to win,” Zelenskyy said.
Ukrainian authorities have urged people living in Donbas to evacuate now, before an imminent Russian offensive, while there is still time.
“Later, people will be attacked,” Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said, “and we won’t be able to do anything to help them.”
A Western official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence estimates, said it will take up to a month for Russia’s damaged forces to regroup for a big push into eastern Ukraine. Nearly a quarter of its battalion tactical groups in the country have become “non-combat effective” and have withdrawn or merged with other units, the official said.
Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boichenko said that of the more than 5,000 civilians killed during weeks of Russian bombing and street clashes, 210 were children. He said Russian forces bombed hospitals, including one where 50 people burned to death.
Boichenko said that more than 90% of the city’s infrastructure has been destroyed. Punishment attacks on the strategic port on the Sea of Azov have cut off food, water, fuel and medicine and pulverized homes and businesses.
British defense officials said 160,000 people remained trapped in the city, which had a pre-war population of 430,000. A humanitarian aid convoy accompanied by the Red Cross has been trying unsuccessfully to enter the city since Friday.
Capturing the city would allow Russia to secure a continuous land corridor to the Crimean peninsula, which Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014.
Meanwhile, in the scarred and silent streets of Bucha and other towns around Ukraine’s capital where Russian forces have withdrawn, investigators sought to document what appeared to be widespread killings of civilians. Evidently, some victims had been shot at close range. Some were found with their hands tied or their flesh burned.
At a cemetery in Bucha, workers began loading more than 60 bodies apparently collected in recent days onto a grocery delivery truck for transport to a facility for further investigation.
There were still more bodies to collect in Bucha. The Associated Press spotted two in a house in a quiet neighborhood. From time to time there was the dull rumble of workers clearing the city of mines and other unexploded ordnance.
In Andriivka, a town about 60 kilometers (40 miles) west of kyiv, two policemen from the nearby town of Makariv arrived Tuesday to identify a man whose body was in a field next to a tank track. Officers found 20 bodies in the Makariv area, Capt. Alla Pustova said.
Andriivka residents said the Russians arrived in early March and took the phones of locals. Some people were detained and later released. Others met unknown destinations. Some described sheltering for weeks in cellars normally used to store vegetables for the winter.
With the sixth week of the war drawing to a close, the soldiers were gone, and Russian armored personnel carriers, a tank and other vehicles were destroyed at both ends of the road through the town. Several buildings were reduced to piles of bricks and corrugated metal. Residents struggled without heat, electricity or cooking gas.
“First we were scared, now we are hysterical,” said 64-year-old Valentyna Klymenko. She said that she, her husband and two neighbors withstood the siege by sleeping on piles of potatoes covered with a mattress and blankets. “We didn’t cry at first. Now we are crying.”
North of the village, in the town of Borodyanka, rescue teams combed through the rubble of apartment blocks looking for bodies. Demining units were working nearby.
The Kremlin has insisted that its troops have not committed war crimes and has claimed that Bucha’s images were staged by the Ukrainians.
Thwarted in their efforts to quickly take the capital, it has been reported that an increasing number of President Vladimir Putin’s troops, along with mercenaries, are moving into the Donbas.
At least five people were killed in Russian shelling on Wednesday in the Donetsk region of Donbas, according to Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko, who urged civilians to move to safer areas.
Russian forces also attacked a fuel depot and factory in the Dnipropetrovsk region, just west of Donbas, authorities said. In the Luhansk region, which is part of the Donbas, Russian shelling has set fire to at least 10 multi-storey buildings and a shopping center in the city of Sievierodonetsk, the regional governor reported. There was no immediate news of deaths or injuries.
Ukrainian forces have been fighting Russian-backed separatists in Donbas since 2014. Before its February 24 invasion, Moscow recognized the Luhansk and Donetsk regions as independent states.
Ukrainian authorities have said the bodies of at least 410 civilians have been found in towns around kyiv, and Associated Press journalists in Bucha counted dozens of bodies in civilian clothes and interviewed Ukrainians who said they witnessed atrocities.
In a video address to the UN Security Council on Tuesday, Zelenskyy said civilians had been raped, tortured, shot in the back of the head, thrown into wells, grenaded in their apartments and smashed to the ground. death by tanks while in cars.
In reaction to the alleged atrocities, the United States has announced sanctions against Putin’s two adult daughters and said it is tightening sanctions against Russian banks. Britain has banned investment in Russia and has pledged to end its dependence on Russian coal and oil by the end of the year.
The European Union was also expected to take additional punitive measures, including an embargo on coal.
Elsewhere in Ukraine, the aid group Doctors Without Borders said its staff witnessed an attack Monday on a cancer hospital in a residential district of the southern city of Mykolaiv. The group said it was the third known attack in recent days on a hospital in the port city, the capture of which is key to giving Russia control of the Black Sea coast.
He said he didn’t have a total death toll, but his team saw a body.
Oleksandr Stashevskyi and Cara Anna in Bucha, Ukraine, Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations, Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Ukraine, and Associated Press journalists from around the world contributed to this report.
Reference-thehill.com