Every week we wrap up the must-reads from our coverage of the Ukraine war, from news and features to analysis, visual guides and opinion.
Russia tightens its grip on the Donbas
Peter Beaumont reported this week on Russia’s advances in the Donbas region, with Ukrainian officials admitting that Moscow has the “upper hand” in fighting in the country’s east as defending forces fell back from some of their positions.
Amid reports that Lyman, the site of an important railway junction, had largely been taken, Ukraine’s general staff said that Russian forces were also advancing on Sievierodonetsk, Bakhmut and Avdiivka.
Serhiy Haidai, the governor of the Luhansk region, which makes up the southern part of the Donbas, said just 5% of the region now remained in Ukrainian hands – down from about 10% little more than a week ago.
Ukraine’s president has also given an insight into the level of losses being suffered by his forces in the Donbas. “Today, from 50 to 100 people could be killed here in the most complicated area, in the east of our country,” Volodymyr Zelenskiy said.
The plight of Mariupol’s survivors
Shaun Walker has written about the horrors endured by Mariupol’s remaining residents, following the end of Russia’s devastating months-long siege of the city.
He spoke to Svitlana and Vitaly, a couple who lost almost everything, including their unborn baby, before being forced into a wearying and humiliating journey through so-called “filtration” procedures, followed by forced deportation to Russia.
“There’s nothing there,” Vitaly said bitterly. “Nothing. It’s over. Mariupol is over.”
Meanwhile, Andrew Roth reported on Russia’s deployment of mobile propaganda vans with large-screen televisions to humanitarian aid points in the captured city as the Kremlin has pushed forward with efforts to integrate newly occupied territories across the south of Ukraine.
“The practice of ‘there is nothing to eat, so feed them lies’ is gaining momentum,” wrote Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian mayor of Mariupol. It’s “cynicism of the highest level”.
The Guardian documents Russia’s use of illegal weapons
As prosecutors investigate alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine, reporters Lorenzo Tondo and Isobel Koshiw, and photographer Alessio Mamo revealed the evidence they discovered on the ground: cluster bombs, fléchettes and unguided missiles on residential areas.
On 1 March, a Russian air force jet dropped a series of 250kg Soviet-era FAB-250 bombs over Borodyanka, north of Kyiv – explosives designed to hit military targets such as enemy fortifications and bunkers. The bombs fell on at least five residential buildings, splitting them in two. Dozens of bodies were found under the rubble when the Russians withdrew.
Bellingcat, a not-for-profit online journalism collective dedicated to war crime investigations, reviewed some of the pictures collected by the Guardian and confirmed the presence of cluster bombs in towns and villages occupied by the Russians. The weapons, banned in more than 100 countries (but not the US, Russia or Ukraine) were unleashed in areas with no military personnel and no military infrastructure.
‘I lost everything’
Lorenzo Tondo met Ivan Mishchenko, a farmer in a small village north of Kyiv whose plight mirrors that of hundreds like him and has worsened food insecurity around the world.
Their businesses were devastated by a war that has unleashed economic devastation in the country and threatened famine elsewhere. And like other farmers in Ukraine, Mishchenko’s few hectares of surviving wheat fields cannot be harvested due to the shortage of fuel in the region and after his harvester and other machinery were destroyed by shelling.
“The war will absolutely cause grain shortage and perhaps hunger,” Mishchenko said.
Last child leaves Kutuzivka
Daniel Boffey reported on eight-year-old Tymofiy Seidov, the last child in a ruined village in north-east Ukraine to be evacuated with his family from the basement in which they lived for three months, after a benefactor read of their plight in the Guardian.
Tymofiy did not want to come out of his underground home in Kutuzivka, east of Kharkiv, owing to Russian fire, but he was gently persuaded to leave on Sunday by his mother, Rita Sotnikova.
The family’s evacuation was made possible after a Guardian reader with connections to Ukraine Now, a not-for-profit organisation, made contact to offer logistical help.
Our visual guide to the invasion is updated regularly and can be found here.
