KYIV | Ukraine is trying to find out on Thursday whether the bombardment of a theater where several hundred civilians would have taken refuge in the besieged city of Mariupol had caused victims, exactly three weeks after the start of the Russian invasion.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has launched a new appeal for help to Westerners, this time before the German Parliament.
“In Mariupol, the Russian Air Force knowingly dropped a bomb on the Drama Theater in the city center. The building is destroyed,” said Mr. Zelensky on Wednesday. “The number of dead is not yet known.”
“The world must finally admit that Russia has become a terrorist state,” he said.
The town hall of this strategic port on the Sea of Azov said overnight from Wednesday to Thursday that “more than a thousand” people were in the theater.
A deputy, Sergui Tarouta, told him on Facebook, without citing his sources, that people came out alive from the rubble, the shelter under the theater having held.
Ukrainian officials posted a photo appearing to show the three-story building in flames and devastated by an explosion.
It is “a terrible tragedy,” said Mayor Vadim Boitchenko, accusing Moscow of carrying out a “genocide” of the Ukrainian people.
The American space technology company Maxar Technologies, which specializes in satellite imagery, published a photo of the theater, which it said was taken on Monday.
In this photo consulted by AFP, the word “children” was written, in huge white letters and in Russian, in front and behind the building.
Russia claimed not to have bombed the city, and that the building had been destroyed by the Ukrainian nationalist Azov battalion.
The NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) said it lacked information to assess the situation in Mariupol.
“We cannot rule out the possibility of a Ukrainian military target in the area of the theater, but we know the theater housed at least 500 civilians,” HRW’s Belkis Wille said.
More than 2,100 people have been killed since the start of the war in Mariupol, according to the Ukrainians. People who managed to flee the city in recent days for Zaporozhye, further west, said they melted snow to drink and cook what little food was available on braziers.
“It was getting worse day by day. We were without electricity, without water, without gas, without food, we couldn’t buy anything anywhere,” a woman named Darya told AFP.
Massive military aid to Ukraine
In Washington, responding to a journalist, US President Joe Biden accused his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin of being “a war criminal”.
“Unacceptable and unforgivable” remarks, replied the Kremlin.
Earlier, Mr. Biden had confirmed that his country would provide an additional $800 million in military aid to Kyiv, amounting to $1 billion within a week.
He also indicated that Washington would help Ukraine acquire additional and longer-range air defense systems.
His announcements came shortly after Mr Zelensky appealed for help to the US Congress.
The Ukrainian president is increasing his interventions by videoconference before Western parliaments. Thursday, before the Bundestag which gave him an ovation, he called on Chancellor Olaf Scholz to “destroy” the new “wall” which divides Europe.
Deadly bombings
American military aid must help Kyiv continue to resist Russian forces, which cannot yet claim the capture of any of the largest Ukrainian cities. The Russian army, however, made significant progress in three weeks in the south.
Ten people waiting to buy bread in Cherniguiv, 150 km north of Kyiv, were killed when Russian forces opened fire, the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office said on Wednesday. Moscow denied, accusing “Ukrainian nationalists”.
According to the regional military governor, 53 bodies were brought to the morgue.
Cherniguiv has suffered numerous strikes, as has Kharkiv (northeast), the country’s second largest city, where at least 500 people have been killed since the start of the war on February 24.
In Kyiv, a strike on a building killed one person Thursday at dawn.
“I heard a whistle, and my husband called me shouting. We live on the ground floor, the windows were breaking. The main thing is that we are alive,” Iryna Voïnovska, 55, told AFP in tears. “Unfortunately, a woman died on the 16th floor, crushed by a gas stove.”
The capital was slowly coming back to life on Thursday morning after the lifting of a curfew imposed since Tuesday evening.
But the streets, punctuated with checkpoints and sandbags, remained almost deserted. The city has been emptied of at least half of its 3.5 million inhabitants.
No overall assessment has ever been provided, even if President Zelensky acknowledged on March 12 the death of “about 1,300” Ukrainian soldiers, while Moscow reported nearly 500 dead in its ranks on March 2.
According to the Ukrainian Parliament, 103 children have been killed in the country since the Russian invasion and around 100 injured.
Attacks on the health system
More than three million Ukrainians have already taken the road to exile, the vast majority to Poland. Thousands of them continue their journey to other countries, such as Sweden: Stockholm estimates that they arrive at the rate of nearly 4,000 people a day, and does not rule out receiving up to 200,000. .
The World Health Organization (WHO) has denounced the numerous strikes against health infrastructure.
“It starts to become part of the strategy and tactics of war. This is totally unacceptable,” said Michael Ryan, WHO emergency chief.
In this context, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest court of the UN, on Wednesday ordered Moscow to immediately halt its military operations. Decision rejected by the Kremlin.
Imperturbable, Vladimir Putin hammered Wednesday in a speech that the offensive was “a success”.
Faced with Western sanctions, which he compared to a “blitzkrieg”, he promised financial aid to individuals and businesses on Wednesday.
Continuation of talks
The determination of the two camps does not prevent the pursuit in parallel of talks, relaunched Monday by videoconference at the level of delegations.
“My priorities in these negotiations are clear: end of the war, guarantees of security, sovereignty, restoration of our territorial integrity, real guarantees for our country”, detailed Mr. Zelensky on Wednesday evening.
According to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, negotiators are now discussing “a compromise”, which would make Ukraine a neutral country on the model of Sweden and Austria.
Without denying discussions on neutrality, the chief Ukrainian negotiator Mykhaïlo Podoliak rejected the idea of such a model.
“The model can only be ‘Ukrainian'”, with “absolute security guarantees”.
The UK, US, Albania, France, Norway and Ireland have called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on Thursday afternoon.