MARIUPOL, Ukraine (AP) — Civilians trapped inside Mariupol desperately scrounged for food and fuel as Russian forces kept up their bombardment of the port city Thursday amid international condemnation over an airstrike a day earlier that killed three people at a maternity hospital.
Western and Ukrainian officials called the hospital attack on Wednesday a war crime by Moscow. Meanwhile, the highest-level talks held since the invasion began two weeks ago yielded no progress, the number of refugees fleeing the country topped 2.3 million, and Kyiv braced for an onslaught, its mayor boasting that the capital had become practically a fortress protected by armed civilians.
More than 1,300 people have died in the 10-day siege of the frigid city of Mariupol, according to Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk.
Residents of the southern seaport of 430,000 have no heat or phone service, and many have no electricity. Nighttime temperatures are regularly below freezing, and daytime ones normally hover just above it. Bodies are being buried in mass graves.
Grocery stores and pharmacies were emptied days ago by people breaking in to get supplies, according to a local official with the Red Cross, Sacha Volkov. A black market is operating for vegetables, meat is unavailable, and people are stealing gasoline from cars, Volkov said.
Places protected from bombings are hard to find, with basements reserved for women and children, he said. Residents, Volkov, are turning on one another: “People started to attack each other for food.”
Repeated attempts to send in food and medicine and evacuate civilians have been thwarted by Russians shelling, Ukrainian authorities said.
“They want to destroy the people of Mariupol. They want to make them starve,” Vereshchuk said. “It’s a war crime.”
A child was among those killed in the hospital airstrike in Mariupol. Seventeen people were also wounded, including women waiting to give birth, doctors, and children buried in the rubble. Images of the attack, with pregnant women covered in dust and blood, dominated news reports in many countries.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Russian leaders that the invasion will backfire on them as their economy is strangled. Western sanctions have already dealt a severe blow, causing the ruble to plunge, foreign businesses to flee and prices to rise sharply.
“You will definitely be prosecuted for complicity in war crimes,” Zelenskyy said in a video address. “And then, it will definitely happen, you will be hated by Russian citizens — everyone whom you have been deceiving constantly, daily, for many years in a row, when they feel the consequences of your lies in their wallets, in their shrinking possibilities, in the stolen future of Russian children.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin dismissed such talk, saying the country has endured sanctions before.
“Just as we overcame these difficulties in the previous years, we will overcome them now,” he said at a televised meeting of government officials. He did, however, acknowledge the sanctions create “certain challenges.”
In addition those who have fled the country, millions have been driven from their homes inside Ukraine. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said about 2 million people — half the population of the metropolitan area — have left the capital.
“Every street, every house … is being fortified,” he said. “Even people who in their lives never intended to change their clothes, now they are in uniform with machine guns in their hands.”
