Residents of Mariupol, which is being continuously bombed by Russia, have been taken to Russia over the last week, the Mariupol city council is reporting.
The council said that “several thousand Mariupol residents were deported to Russia. The occupiers illegally removed people from the Left Bank district and shelters in the building of the sports club, where more than a thousand people (mostly women and children) were hiding from constant bombing,” the statement reads.
The council said that the residents were taken to “filtration camps, where occupiers checked people’s phones and documents”. After, residents were “redirected to remote cities in Russia, the fate of other remain unknown”.
Inna Sovsun(@InnaSovsun)
#Mariupol city council informed that thousand of #Ukraine citizens from the captured parts of Mariupol have been forcibly interned to filtration camps, and then to remote villages in #russia.
The GULAG has been restored
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy published a video address just a short time ago. We’ll work on bringing you a full translation shortly, but here is an excerpt being reported by Ukrainian media.
The 24th day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is over. After eight years of aggression, Ukrainians have proved that they know how to fight more professionally than an army that has been fighting for decades in different regions and under different conditions. We respond with wisdom and courage to the huge number of their equipment and soldiers sent to Ukraine.
That is why, for example, the Ukrainian Chornobayivka will go down in war history. This is a place where the Russian military and their commanders have shown themselves completely as they are: incompetent, able to simply drive their people to slaughter.
Zelenskiy said more than 6,600 people were evacuated through eight humanitarian corridors on Saturday, including from Bervytsia and Bucha.
“Due to the shelling of the occupiers, we were unable to remove people from Borodyanka, Kyiv region,” he said. “More than 4,000 Mariupol residents managed to leave for Zaporizhia.”
Australia has banned the sale of alumina and aluminium ores to Russia in response to what it described as “unrelenting and illegal aggression” towards Ukraine, reports Christopher Knaus.
The country’s federal government has been under pressure to stop the export of alumina to Russia, with critics warning it was potentially allowing Australian resources to be used in munitions manufacturing.
The government overnight announced it was ceasing all exports of alumina and aluminum ores, including bauxite, to limit Russia’s ability to produce aluminium, a major Russian export and a critical component in arms and munitions.
Russia relies on Australia for 20% of its alumina needs.
Hello, this is Helen Davidson here to take you through the news developments for the next few hours.
Russian cosmonauts on the International Space Station have rejected claims their yellow and blue flight suits are a nod to Ukraine, and have expressed support for their president.
Shortly after arriving Artemyev was asked and said the crew had just “accumulated a lot of yellow material so we needed to use it”. In a follow up statement published on the Russian space agency’s Telegram channel, he again urged people to not “look for any hidden signs or symbols” in the suits.
“A colour is simply a colour. It is not in any way connected to Ukraine. Otherwise, we would have to recognise its rights to the yellow sun in the blue sky.
“These days, even though we are in space, we are together with our president and our people!”
He gave a different reason for the choice this time – saying the crew chose the colours of the prestigious Bauman Moscow State Technical University, of which all three are graduates.
It’s 2am on Sunday in Ukraine. Here’s a summary of the developments that were seen so far today:
Poland has proposed that the EU implement a total ban on trade with Russia, the country’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, said.
Russia said it had used hypersonic weapons, which travel fast enough to evade detection by missile defence systems, to destroy an underground military depot in western Ukraine.
Residents of Mariupol have been taken to Russia, where they have been “redirected” to remote cities in the country, the Mariupol city council has reported.
Boris Johnson has come under heavy criticism for comparing the struggle of Ukrainians fighting to the British public voting for Brexit.
Kyiv officials have reported that 228 people, including four children, have been killed in Russia’s capitol. Ukraine’s ministry of foreign affairs reported that 14,400 Russian personnel have been killed since the start of the war.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy called for “meaningful, fair” peace talks to take place urgently. He told Moscow that Russian losses would otherwise be so huge it would take generations to recover. “Negotiations on peace, on security for us, for Ukraine – meaningful, fair and without delay – are the only chance for Russia to reduce the damage from its own mistakes,” he said.
Zelenskiy also urged Switzerland to crack down on Russian oligarchs who he said are helping to wage war on Ukraine from the safety of “beautiful Swiss towns”.
The southern city of Zaporizhzhia entered a 38-hour curfew beginning at 1400 GMT on Saturday (1600 local time) after the Ukrainian military ordered people to stay home until early on Monday.
Aid agencies are being prevented from reaching people trapped in Ukrainian cities surrounded by Russian forces, the World Food Programme said.
Ukraine may not produce enough crops to export if this year’s sowing season is disrupted by Russia’s invasion, the presidential adviser Oleh Ustenko has said.
Ten humanitarian corridors were agreed on with Russia for the evacuation of citizens, deputy prime minister Iryna Vereshchuk has said.
My colleague Helen Davidson is taking things over from here. Stay tuned for more live updates.
The Guardian’s Moscow correspondentsAndrew RothandPjotr Sauer wrote about why public support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is still high, despite hopes from the West that it is waning:
There have been efforts from abroad to encourage the Russian people to protest against the war. Former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger last week released a nine-minute video in which he recalled his admiration for the Soviet weightlifter Yuri Vlasov and his father’s shame at fighting for the Nazi army at Leningrad. “This is not the Russian people’s war,” he said in an appeal to ordinary Russians.
But others in Russia say it is. Many supporters cite the eight-year-old war between Ukraine and Russian proxy forces in Donbas, using words such as genocide and comparisons to the second world war to justify the invasion.
As one former diplomat wrote in a WhatsApp message, he looks forward to Russia holding a “Nuremberg 2.0” in Ukraine after the war. “Aren’t you sad for the children killed in Donbas?” Elizaveta from Moscow shot back when asked about her views on the invasion. “Why don’t you write about them instead?”
Russian society is deeply polarised between supporters and opponents of the Kremlin. Those camps have carried this division over into support for and opposition to the war, experts said. Even simple choices such as whether to call the conflict a “war” or the state-sanctioned “military operation” carry political meaning.
“We are seeing that society is divided by a majority that broadly supports the war and a minority that is against it,” said Sergei Belanovsky, a sociologist. “These two groups live in different worlds, and cannot convince each other that their viewpoint is the right one.”
According to the state-run Russian Public Opinion Research Center, 71% of Russians “support Russia’s decision to hold a special military operation in Ukraine”. Valery Fyodorov, head of the polling centre, said that new data to be published by the centre this week would show an increase in support for the “military operation”.
The most recent intelligence update from the UK Ministry of Defence says that Russia has still failed to gain control of Ukrainian airspace, one of its main objectives.
“Their continued failure to do so has significantly blunted their operational progress,” reads the statement.
Ministry of Defence (@DefenceHQ)
Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine – 19 March 2022
Kyiv Independent is reporting that a Russian diplomat made vague comments about Russia having plans to confront NATO on Bosnian TV.
The Kyiv Independent(@KyivIndependent)
Russian diplomat: “We have plans against NATO.”
Igor Kalabukhov, Russian ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina, said in an interview with Bosnia’s Face TV that Moscow is “assessing the geo-strategic situation” and will respond to threats.
Residents of Mariupol, which is being continuously bombed by Russia, have been taken to Russia over the last week, the Mariupol city council is reporting.
The council said that “several thousand Mariupol residents were deported to Russia. The occupiers illegally removed people from the Left Bank district and shelters in the building of the sports club, where more than a thousand people (mostly women and children) were hiding from constant bombing,” the statement reads.
The council said that the residents were taken to “filtration camps, where occupiers checked people’s phones and documents”. After, residents were “redirected to remote cities in Russia, the fate of other remain unknown”.
Inna Sovsun(@InnaSovsun)
#Mariupol city council informed that thousand of #Ukraine citizens from the captured parts of Mariupol have been forcibly interned to filtration camps, and then to remote villages in #russia.
The GULAG has been restored
Ukrainian forces have defeated Russia in its initial campaign of the war, according to analysis from DC-based think tank Institute of the Study of War, ultimately leading to a stalemate between the two counties.
The institute describes Russia’s strategy as using “airborne and mechanized operations to seize Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa and other major Ukrainian cities”.
“Russian forces continue to make limited advances in some parts of the theater but are very unlikely to be able to seize their objectives in this way,” the analysis reads. The fall of Mariupol is “unlikely” to change the outcome of the initial campaign dramatically.
The analysis notes that the Russia military continues to focus on localized fighting rather than launching large-scale operations. It concludes that there is a stalemate throughout most of Ukraine that, if continued, will “likely be very violent and bloody”.
The Kyiv Independent reported today that Russia is illegally forcing untrained men living in the Russian-controlled Donbasregion to fight and putting them on the frontlines.
“These people have never even held a machine gun in their hands,” said Oleksii, a 24-year-old resident of Russian-occupied Khrestivka in Donetsk, speaking of friends, classmates and former colleagues that he knows have been conscripted.
One Donbas resident named Anastasia told the news outlet that these civilians from Donbas are forced to serve in frontline positions, with Russian forces threatening to shoot them if they don’t comply.
Journalist Neil Hauer, a freelancer journalist reporting in Kyiv, has an interesting Twitter thread about the intensifying anti-Russian sentiment among Ukrainians that is directed at the average Russian, not just Vladimir Putin.
Neil Hauer(@NeilPHauer)
Something I’ve noticed over the past week or so here: almost every Ukrainian I spoke to has made it clear that they blame not only Putin, but the average Russian as much (or more) for this war. The view is: we overthrew our corrupt government, and they accept their murderous one.
The amount of animosity from the average Ukrainian towards the average Russian is already huge and growing more with every single new airstrike, every new civilian death. The effects of this war will last for generations.
And I’m saying this from Kharkiv. I think I saw more virulently anti-Russian views here than anywhere else in the country. The sense of betrayal here, of ‘how could they possibly do this to *us*’, is incredible.
The people we watched crawl out of the rubble today told us their relatives in Moscow didn’t believe them. Videos of their destroyed home were met with ‘it’s a fake’ or ‘Nazis did it.’ *Every* bond between Ukrainians & Russians – familial, cultural, historical – is being broken.
A video of a police officer in Mariupol, where fighting has been intensifying, is starting to circulate. The officer, Michail Vershnin, directs his pleas to Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron, saying that his city has been “wiped off the face of the earth”.
“Children, elderly people are dying. The city is destroyed and it has been wiped off the face of the earth,” he said in Russian in the video filmed on Friday.
“You have promised that there will be help, give us that help. Biden, Macron, you are great leaders. Be them to the end,” he said.
Bloomberg Quicktake(@Quicktake)
“You have promised that there will be help, give us that help.”
A police officer in the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol issued a direct appeal for help to President Biden and President Macron on Friday pic.twitter.com/5fA2DHJ5CG
The frontman of one of Ukrainian’s biggest bands, BoomBox, went viral at the beginning of the war with an Instagram video of him singing a Ukrainian freedom fighter song.
Reposted on Twitter by Buzzfeed journalist Christopher Miller, Andriy Khlyvnyuk can be seen in uniform with a rifle. Instead of going on a US and Canadian tour, Khlyvnyuk, like many Ukrainian celebrities, chose to stay in his country to fight.
Christopher Miller(@ChristopherJM)
While Khlyvnyuk skipped BoomBox’s US tour to help his country fight against Russia, he managed time for one stirring performance in Kyiv in between his new police tasks. It went viral. Read more about it here: https://t.co/3CJwsYbuJ2pic.twitter.com/HI42Bh9jux
“This is my duty. Ukraine is my home,” Khlyvnyuk told Buzzfeed’s Miller. “And it’s not that easy to push me out of my home.”
Kyiv officials have just said that 228 people, including four children, have been killed in the Ukrainian capital since the invasion began.
The Kyiv Independent(@KyivIndependent)
In Kyiv, 228 people, including 4 children, have been killed since Russia’s all-out invasion.
According to the city council, more than 900 citizens, including 16 children, were wounded. Nearly 40 houses, six schools, and four kindergartens were damaged.
This is Lauren Aratani in New York taking over for Nadeem Badshah.
Earlier today, Pope Francis paid a visit to a ward in the Bambino Gesu Children’s Hospital in Rome that is treating Ukrainian refugee children. The children are undergoing treatment for illnesses like cancer or neurological diseases, according to the Catholic News Agency.
The hospital has treated 50 Ukrainian children since the start of the war, including 19 children who were brought in for treatment on Saturday.
In a message to a gathering of European Catholic representatives yesterday, the Pope denounced the “perverse abuse of power” in Ukraine and said that Ukrainians have been attacked in their “identity, history and tradition” and are “defending their land”. While the Pope clearly denounced the war, he did not speak of Russia as an aggressor during his speech.
The pope visiting a family at the Bambino Gesu Children’s Hospital in Rome. Photograph: Vatican Media/Reuters
Two weeks ago, Alani Iyanuoluwa fled Kyiv as the Russian invasion intensified. Making her way across Europe, the 24-year-old hoped to be reunited with family in London. Yet for 10 days she has been stranded in a French port – because she is Nigerian.
Iyanuoluwa is among a growing number of refugees who claim the British government is ignoring black people who fled Ukraine.
Their experiences have again raised the issue of race and the UK’s welcome to refugees, prompting claims that ministers would never have unveiled last week’s humanitarian sponsorship scheme for Ukrainians had it not been aimed at white Europeans.
(@DefenceHQ)
Russian diplomat: “We have plans against NATO.”
(@MFA_Ukraine)
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