Surrounded by Russian forces and most affected by the war, Russian troops have entered the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol and into the interior. A fierce fighting in Mariupol has led to the closure of a major steel plant and local authorities have called for more help from Western countries.
Mariupol police officer Michael Vershnein, in a video addressed to Western leaders, showed a scene of rubble scattered on a road nearby, saying: ‘Children, the elderly are dying. The city has been destroyed and its trace has been wiped from the earth.’ A Ukrainian military official told ‘The New York Times’ that information has also started to emerge about a rocket attack in the southern city of Mykolaiv in the past, in which 40 marines were killed.
Russian forces have already cut off Mariupol’s contact with the Azov Sea. Vadim Denisenko, adviser to the Ukrainian Interior Minister, said that Ukraine and Russian forces fought over the Azovstal iron plant in Mariupol. “One of the biggest metallurgical plants in Europe is really falling apart,” Denisenko said on television.
Mariupol city council claimed shortly thereafter that Russian troops had forcibly relocated thousands of the city’s residents, mostly women and children, to Russia. However, he did not specify where the people were taken and the AP could not immediately confirm the claim. Oleksiy Erestovich, adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said that the military close to assisting Mariupol was already fighting a “massive enemy power” and that “there is currently no military solution to Mariupol.” Zelensky said early Sunday that the siege of Mariupol would go down in history as a war crime committed by Russian soldiers.
The figures of Russian soldiers killed in the war vary but it is estimated that thousands of Russian soldiers have died in this war. In 2008, 64 Russian soldiers were killed in five days of fighting during the war with Georgia. About 15,000 Russian soldiers died in 10 years in Afghanistan and over 11,000 in Chechnya over the years of fighting.