This happened last night: civilians from Mariupol ‘deported against will to Russia’, bombing continues | Abroad

According to the city council of the Ukrainian port city, thousands of people have been ‘deported’ by Russian troops in recent days. “The occupiers illegally kidnapped people from the Livoberezhniy neighborhood and from the sports club’s bomb shelter, which housed more than a thousand people, mostly women and children, because of the constant bombing,” the city council said in a statement to Telegram.

People from the Russian-recognized Luhansk and Donetz People’s Republics were said to have been transported to Russia against their will. The Russian news agency Tass confirmed that 13 buses carrying more than 350 people were on their way to Russia.

President Volodimir Zelensky called last night’s siege of the city “terror that the world will remember for centuries and the more Ukrainians talk about it, the more support we get from the world.” According to the Ukrainian head of state, the Russians and the pro-Russian rebels from the Donbas region are guilty of war crimes, partly by shelling civilian targets and now also forced deportation, he said in his video message.

Heavy fighting took place at the Azovstal steel mill in Mariupol, one of the largest in Europe. “One of the largest metallurgical plants in Europe has been destroyed. The economic losses for Ukraine are enormous,” said MP Lesia Vasylenko.

According to the authorities of the port city, the nearly 400,000 people trapped in Mariupol have been living under constant bombardment for almost two weeks, without heating, electricity and running water. Mariupol, on the Sea of ​​Azov and about 60 kilometers from the Russian border, is essential in Russia’s plan to establish a land link with the Crimean peninsula, which was annexed in 2014.

Russia describes the actions in Ukraine as a “special military operation” to denazify the neighboring country. The US and the EU see this as a bad alibi to recapture pieces of the former Soviet republic. Russia denies that it also deports civilians.

North of Ukraine, Belarusian railway workers are said to have cut many rail links between Belarus and Ukraine. The chief of Ukrainian railways, Olexander Kamyshin, thanked his colleagues in Belarus for the undisclosed action. “As of today, I can say that there is no train traffic between Belarus and Ukraine,” he said, according to the Unian agency. This would mean that Russian troops in Ukraine would not be able to get reinforcements or supplies by rail.

The Belarusian opposition members were enthusiastic about this on Twitter. ‘Heroes!’ wrote one of them about the action of the railway workers. All this could not be confirmed by independent sources. Although Russian troops have invaded Ukraine from Belarus, that country’s authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko (who is considered a protégé of Vladimir Putin), has so far refused to deploy his troops in the neighboring country.

The Russians have dealt a hard blow to the Ukrainian army. At least 50 dead have now been buried under the rubble after the rocket attack by Russian troops on a barracks in Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine, according to a newspaper report.

In all, about 200 soldiers were sleeping in the building when two precision missiles hit, the police said Ukraine Pravda† Nearly 60 injured were taken by soldiers to nearby hospitals. The information on the number of victims could not be independently verified.

According to the British Ministry of Defense, the Ukrainian air force and anti-aircraft guns are still succeeding in ‘effectively defending Ukrainian airspace’. The siege of Kiev is still ongoing. In the south, the Russians are mainly engaged in shelling. According to British experts, the latter could take weeks and will increase, despite Ukrainian resistance. “Russia has failed to gain control of the air and is largely using weapons launched from relatively safe Russian airspace to hit targets in Ukraine,” the British ministry said on Twitter.

Kiev and Moscow, meanwhile, both report the evacuation of thousands more civilians from hard-fought areas. More than 4,100 people fled Mariupol yesterday. Nearly 2,500 other civilians were brought to safety from the Kiev and Luhansk regions via the so-called ‘humanitarian corridors’. It is reported from the Russian side that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have expressed a wish to flee to Russia.

Ukraine’s National Security Council has now banned the activities of a number of pro-Russian parties, President Volodimir Zelensky also announced last night. The ban applies for the duration of martial law in the country. “The activities of their politicians, aimed at division or cooperation, will not succeed, but will receive a harsh response,” said the Ukrainian head of state.

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