The mayor of Mariupol said that according to the latest data, about 21,000 civilians have been killed in the besieged Ukrainian port city since the beginning of the Russian invasion, Reuters reports.
Commenting on television, Mariupol Mayor Vadim Boychenko said it was difficult to calculate the exact number of victims since the start of the street fighting. The Ukrainian city is under siege by Russian forces, who have been preventing the evacuation of civilians for weeks. The city of Mariupol has become a symbol of the war crimes committed by the Russian army since the beginning of its unprovoked aggression against Ukraine. There is no building that has not been hit by Russian forces, and everyday civilian continues to die of starvation or lack of medicine. The number of children killed is also high.
“We will not allow anyone to forget about our cities, Mariupol, and other Ukrainian cities that are being destroyed by the Russian military,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to deny that the Russian military is committing war crimes in Ukraine. According to Putin, this war was inevitable because there was a risk to Russia’s national security. What is this risk – the Kremlin does not answer.
Zelensky again called on Western countries to tighten sanctions against Russia. He said they should affect it so badly that “they should stop talking about weapons of mass destruction”. And more: imposing an oil embargo on Russia is simply mandatory, Zelensky stressed. Any new package of sanctions, not including oil, is met with ridicule in Moscow, he added. The Ukrainian president also said his country needed heavy weapons to retake Russian-occupied areas of the port city of Mariupol. “If we had planes, enough armored vehicles, and artillery strike force, we would have succeeded,” Zelenski said. There are reports that Russian forces used an unknown chemical substance that they threw over the city.
