More than 5,000 civilians have been killed in the besieged city of Mariupol since the Russian invasion of Ukraine started, a top official has claimed.
Mariupol mayor Vadym Boichenko said that among the thousands of civilians killed during weeks of Russian airstrikes and street fighting, 210 were children.
He claimed Russian forces bombed hospitals, including one in which 50 people burned to death, and added that more than 9 per cent of the city’s infrastructure has now been completely destroyed.
The city has been encircled by Russian forces for more than a month and has been cut off from food, water, fuel and medicine supplies.
Almost 160,000 people remained trapped in the city, which had a pre-war population of 430,000, according to British defence officials.
A humanitarian-relief convoy accompanied by the Red Cross has been trying without success to get into the city since Friday.
In other developments, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky warned that Moscow is now marshalling reinforcements and trying to push deeper into the country’s east.
“The fate of our land and of our people is being decided. We know what we are fighting for. And we will do everything to win,” Mr Zelensky said.
His comments came after a US defence official said that Russian forces had completed the pullout of all of its estimated 24,000 or more troops from the Kyiv and Chernihiv areas in the north of the country.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they were being sent into Belarus or Russia to resupply and reorganise.
In response to the scenes of atrocities that were revealed when Russian forces left the town of Bucha, northwest of the capital, Kyiv, last week, the US and Western allies have imposed yet further sanctions against the Kremlin.
The UK government put an asset freeze on Russia’s largest bank Sberbank and an “outright ban” on outward investment to the country, worth £11 billion in 2020.
Meanwhile, US president Joe Biden signed an executive order directly targeting Mr Putin and foreign minister Sergei Lavrov’s families, and also blocked further new investment in Russia.
“There’s nothing less happening than major war crimes,” Mr Biden said in a speech to labour leaders, referring to the Ukrainian town of Bucha retaken from Russian forces where civilians were found shot at close range.
“Responsible nations have to come together to hold these perpetrators accountable,” he said. “And together with our allies and our partners, we’re going to keep raising economic costs and ratchet up the pain for Putin.”
Moscow has insisted its troops have committed no war crimes and said that the images out of Bucha were staged by the Ukrainians.
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Additional reporting by agencies
