At least six people were killed in an overnight bombing in Kyiv as Ukraine rejected an ultimatum to surrender the besieged port city of Mariupol to Russian forces by 5am (0300 GMT) on Monday, its deputy prime minister told Ukrainian media. Many of Mariupol’s 400,000 residents remain trapped with little if any food, water and power, and have faced some of the heaviest bombardments since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24. Follow the latest developments on our live blog.
At least six people were killed in an overnight bombing in Kyiv, AFP journalists reported.
Ukraine said there is no question of surrendering Mariupol after Russia called on Ukrainian forces on Sunday to lay down arms in the besieged port city.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky denounced the Russian bombing of an art school in Mariupol where he said about 400 civilians were taking shelter. “They are under the rubble, and we don’t know how many of them have survived,” he said. “But we know that we will certainly shoot down the pilot who dropped that bomb, like about 100 other such mass murderers whom we already have downed.”
US President Joe Biden will travel to Poland on Friday to meet with President Andrzej Duda for discussions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the White House said Sunday, as part of a previously planned trip to Europe to meet with leaders from NATO, the G7 and the European Union.
More than 900 civilians have been killed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and more than 1,450 have been injured, the UN’s human rights office said Sunday. Due to a lack of information from badly hit cities including Mariupol, the actual tolls are thought to be considerably higher, the office said.
At least 10 million people in Ukraine have fled their homes due to the “devastating” war in the country and are either internally displaced or have become refugees abroad, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, said on Twitter.
The Russian defence ministry said on Sunday it had once again fired its Kinzhal hypersonic missiles in Ukraine, “destroying a large storage site for fuels and lubricants” in the Mykolaiv region. Russian Kinzhals on Saturday targeted “a large underground warehouse containing missiles and aviation ammunition” in the village of Deliatyn in the Ivano-Frankivsk region.
Mariupol’s rescue workers were still searching for survivors after a theatre was flattened by Russian air strikes on Wednesday. Moscow denies hitting the building or targeting civilians.
