KYIV | Ukraine on Monday rejected Russia’s ultimatum demanding the surrender of the beleaguered city of Mariupol whose devastation has been labeled a “major war crime” by the European Union, as a new bombardment caused at least eight dead in Kyiv.
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“There is no question of talking about surrender (…) We have already informed the Russian side about it,” Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk told the Ukrayinskaya Pravda newspaper.
The Russian Ministry of Defense called on Ukraine on Sunday to “lay down its arms” in Mariupol, a large southern port city, and demanded a “written response” to its ultimatum which expired Monday morning.
According to Mikhail Mizintsev, director of Russia’s National Center for Defense Management, Russia and Ukraine have agreed on a route for residents of Mariupol to travel to territory controlled by Kyiv on Monday. “From 10:00 a.m. Moscow time (…) Russia opens humanitarian corridors from Mariupol to the East, and in agreement with the Ukrainian side, to the West”, detailed Mr. Mizintsev.
“The occupiers continue to behave like terrorists,” replied Iryna Vereshchuk on Telegram. “They say they agree (to set up a) humanitarian corridor and in the morning they bombard the place of evacuation.”
According to local authorities, Russian soldiers forcibly transported some 1,000 residents to Russia, depriving them of their Ukrainian passports – a possible war crime.
Ms Vereshchuk also told Ukrainska Pravda that “350 children will be forcibly taken to Russia without allowing us to collect them”, asking the Russian authorities to tell them “in which orphanage” they will be placed, and “why”.
The Deputy Prime Minister called for priority to be given to a humanitarian corridor, allowing around 350,000 people still stranded in Mariupol to leave.
Mariupol is a central target in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. It forms a land bridge between Russian forces in Crimea to the southwest and Russian-controlled territory to the north and east.
The predominantly Russian-speaking city has been under heavy shelling from Russian forces since the invasion began on February 24. Its inhabitants are deprived of electricity, water and gas, its streets are strewn with corpses.
According to the military administration of the Donetsk region, “more than 80% of the city’s infrastructure is damaged or destroyed. Of this 80%, about 40% is not recoverable”.
The United Nations has described the humanitarian situation as “extremely serious”, with “a critical and life-threatening shortage of food, water and medicine”.
For the head of EU diplomacy, Josep Borrell, “what is happening in Mariupol is a major war crime. The indiscriminate bombings devastate the city and kill everyone”.
New sanctions
Borrell was speaking ahead of a meeting of EU foreign and defense ministers in Brussels on Monday to discuss new sanctions against Moscow.
The EU should also approve the constitution of a military force of 5,000 combatants and commit to an increase in its military expenditure in order to be able to carry out interventions alone by 2025 – “part of the answer to the conflict, according to Borrell.
In a video on Telegram, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on the Union, and in particular Germany, to stop all trade with Russia, especially concerning “energy resources”, because in this way “Russia will no longer have money for this war.
The Kremlin, for its part, estimated that a potential European embargo on Russian oil would hit “everyone” and “would have a very serious influence on the world oil market”.
The EU has already adopted several sets of sanctions against Moscow, massively targeting companies, banks, senior officials and oligarchs, and banning exports to Russia.
Imports of Russian gas or oil have so far been spared because of their cost for Europeans, who are very dependent on Russian hydrocarbons.
Still on the diplomatic front, a new videoconference on the war is scheduled for 3:00 p.m. GMT between American leaders Joe Biden, French Emmanuel Macron, British Boris Johnson, German Olaf Scholtz and Italian Mario Draghi, according to Washington and Paris.
Mr. Biden will travel to Warsaw on Friday to meet his Polish counterpart and discuss the Russian invasion. The White House said Mr Biden would go to Belgium beforehand to meet NATO, G7 and EU leaders.
gaping crater
Russian forces are also still trying to surround kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, where a bombardment on a shopping center overnight from Sunday to Monday killed at least eight people, according to the general prosecutor’s office.
Bodies of victims were lying Monday morning in front of the Retroville shopping center, in the northwest of kyiv, noted an AFP journalist. Firefighters and soldiers were busy in the rubble to search for other victims.
The very powerful strike pulverized vehicles and left a gaping crater several meters high in the parking lot, in front of a charred and still smoking 10-storey building. Debris, wrecked vehicles and twisted scrap metal littered the stage for hundreds of meters.
According to Mayor Vitali Klitschko, six residential buildings, two schools and two nurseries near the shopping center were also damaged.
He announced a new curfew. “It will start today at 8:00 p.m. (6:00 p.m. GMT) and will last until 7:00 a.m. (0500 GMT) on March 23,” the former world boxing champion wrote on Telegram.
Several curfews have already been observed in the capital. The latest lasted 35 hours last week, from Tuesday evening to Thursday morning.
Mr. Klitschko also called on the inhabitants to wear masks and not to open the windows because “because of the fires, after air strikes in the capital and the region, air pollution is observed”.
kyiv has been emptied of at least half of its 3.5 million inhabitants since the start of the invasion.
In the north of the country, the regional governor of Sumy, Dmytro Zhyvytsky, reported an “ammonia leak” in the facilities of the Sumykhimprom company, affecting an area of 2.5 kilometers around the plant, which produces fertilizer.
The extent and cause of the incident are unclear but residents have been told to seek refuge in basements or low-rise buildings to avoid exposure.
Around 07:45 GMT, Ukrainian relief tweeted that the accident, caused by a bombardment of unspecified origin, was “over”.
The Russian Defense Minister said on Sunday evening that “nationalists” had “mined” the ammonia and chlorine storage facilities in Sumykhimprom “with the aim of massively poisoning the inhabitants of the Sumy region, in the event of an attack. ‘entry into the city of units of the Russian armed forces’.
Belarusian threat
In an interview broadcast by CNN, the Ukrainian president said he was “ready for negotiations” with the Russian president. “I have been ready for the last two years and I think that without negotiations, we will not stop the war”.
He had previously denounced the bombardment of the Mariupol art school, destroyed by Russian strikes while 400 people – women, children and the elderly – were taking refuge there according to local authorities.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov praised on Facebook “the heroic defenders of Mariupol” and “their superhuman courage”, because “today Mariupol saves kyiv, Dnipro (center) and Odessa” (south) by blocking the Russians.
But “the situation is very difficult” in the face of “a numerically very superior enemy and the threat of a ground invasion by the army” of Belarus, an ally of Moscow, he added.
In the large port city of Odessa, several houses were hit on Monday by “enemy shelling”, without causing any casualties, according to the regional military administration.
The United Nations has estimated that around 10 million Ukrainians have fled their homes, of whom around a third have gone abroad, mainly to Poland.
According to the Ukrainian army, the Russians have lost since the start of the invasion 15,000 soldiers, 100 planes, 120 helicopters, 500 tanks and 1,500 armored vehicles – a figure impossible to verify.
In Russia, the security services (FSB) demanded on Monday the “immediate” banning of American social networks Facebook and Instagram because of their activities “directed against Russia and its armed forces”, on the first day of a trial for “extremism” in a context of increased repression since the offensive in Ukraine.