Russia Strikes Back Kyiv But Mariupol in Ruins Refuses to Surrender

Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

 

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine rejected Russia’s demand that soldiers defending the embattled southern port of Mariupol surrender at dawn on Monday, even as a powerful blast rocked the capital, Kyiv, and reduced a sprawling shopping mall to rubble.

After nearly a month of fighting, the war has reached a stalemate, with Russia turning to deadlier and blunter methods, including targeting civilians. A New York Times reporter saw six dead bodies at the mall in Kyiv covered in plastic as rescue workers battled fires and pulled more victims from the wreckage Monday morning.

President Volodymyr Zelensky, addressing the nation overnight, said that a relief convoy in northeastern Ukraine near the city of Kharkiv had been hijacked by Russian forces. And efforts to reach hundreds of thousands of people trapped in Mariupol remained fraught with danger.

“The enemy desperately does not want civilians to break through,” Olena Zelenska, the president’s wife, said in a statement. “But they will. Please hold on, dear people, I beg you. I will repeat my husband’s words, ‘Ukraine doesn’t abandon her people.’”

Across eastern Ukraine, there were signs that Russia was seeking to consolidate control, including a drive to conscript men to fight in their war effort. At the same time, Ukrainian officials and witnesses said they were forcibly deporting people, including children. Oleg Nikolenko, the spokesman for Ukraine’s foreign ministry, said in a statement that 2,389 children were taken from their parents in the Donbas region and sent to Russia on a single day, Saturday. The claim could not be independently confirmed.

In other major developments:

President Biden is making his biggest diplomatic push of the war. On Monday, he will speak to his counterparts from France, Germany, Italy, and Britain. He will travel to Brussels on Wednesday to meet with NATO and European leaders, then head to Poland on Friday.

The United States has said it opposes Poland’s proposal for a NATO peacekeeping mission.

The deputy commander of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, Andrei Paliy, died in combat in Mariupol, according to the governor of Sevastopol, the Crimean city where the fleet is based. Paliy is one of several high-ranking Russian officers who have been killed in action in Ukraine.

President Zelensky called for renewed peace talks with Russia, despite few signs of progress after four days of negotiations last week. 

Russian Court calls Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, an extremist organization and bans it.

 

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Maps: Tracking the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Latest map: Russian forces are making advances in the east, but are largely stalled elsewhere.

 

U.K. accuses Russia of hoax phone calls to British cabinet ministers.

LONDON — Russia was behind two hoax phone calls placed to top British cabinet ministers by a person pretending to be Ukraine’s prime minister, a spokesman for Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Monday.

The calls — to Defense Secretary Ben Wallace and Home Secretary Priti Patel — were purportedly from Denys Shmyhal, the prime minister of Ukraine. A third call, targeting the culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, did not go through.

“The Russian state was responsible for the hoax telephone calls made to U.K. ministers last week,” said the Downing Street spokesman, who by custom was not identified by name. He did not give more specific details.

Mr. Wallace said on Twitter that he had been targeted by an impostor who “posed several misleading questions and after becoming suspicious, I terminated the call.”

“This is standard practice for Russian information operations and disinformation is a tactic straight from the Kremlin playbook to try to distract from their illegal activities in Ukraine and the human rights abuses being committed there,” Mr. Johnson’s spokesman said.

“We are seeing a string of distraction stories and outright lies from the Kremlin, reflecting Putin’s desperation as he seeks to hide the scale of the conflict and Russia’s failings on the battlefield,” he added.

The government has opened an investigation into how an impostor could have gained access to two of its most senior ministers, a jarring security breach.

Mr. Wallace has been a particularly outspoken critic of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Writing in The Times of London before the war broke out, he accused Mr. Putin of crude “ethnonationalism,” based on what Mr. Wallace called the bogus claim that Russians and Ukrainians are one people. 

‘My city is dying a painful death.’ One woman describes life under siege in Mariupol.

Digging graves on the side of the road in Mariupol on Sunday.Credit...Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters

KRAKOW, Poland — There was terrifying shelling at night. There was the near-constant roar of planes and the sound of explosions overhead in the darkness underground. And then there were the corpses heaped on the street.

In a rare firsthand account on social media, Nadezhda Sukhorukova, a Mariupol resident who managed to escape the besieged southern city, has described what she called a living “hell” during weeks of hiding in a basement, only daring to venture out for necessities.

“A neighbor said that God left Mariupol. He was afraid of everything he saw,” Ms. Sukhorukova wrote in a series of Facebook posts posted after her escape late last week. “I am alive and now I will live long. And my city is dying a painful death,” she added. “For twenty days I was dying with it. I was in hell.”

Before the war, Mariupol’s picturesque coastline provided a backdrop for tourists. Now, it has become the scene of some of the greatest horrors of the war. But there have been few witness accounts of what the estimated 300,000 people trapped in the city have had to endure.

The city has been cut off from water, electricity and communications, and the fierce fighting has made it almost impossible to escape. Less than 40 miles from the Russian border and strategically located between a separatist enclave and Crimea, Mariupol has become a key target for Russian forces.

Ms. Sukhorukova said one of the few glimmers of hope amid her ordeal was the camaraderie with her neighbors as they struggled to survive the Russian assault.

Getting reliable information from the city has been fraught. The only international journalists who had remained in the city in recent weeks were a team from The Associated Press. But they said on Monday they were forced to flee after appearing on a Russian hit list.

When people do emerge in the trickle of evacuations through humanitarian corridors that open sporadically, they bring with them glimpses of life under siege.

“The dead lie in the entrances, on the balconies, in the yards. And you’re not scared one bit,” Ms. Sukhorukova wrote. “Because the biggest fear is night shelling. Do you know what night shelling looks like? Like death.”

The blasts sounded like “a huge hammer is pounding on the iron roof and then a terrible rattle, as if the ground was cut with a huge knife, or a huge iron giant walks in forged boots on your land and steps on houses, trees, people,” she added.

“You sit and realize that you can’t even move. You can’t run, there’s no point in screaming, there’s no point in hiding. He will still find you if he wants to. And then there is silence.”

As she went out onto the streets looking for water, her hair matted from the inability to bathe for days, she said she dreamed of two things: “not to get shot and to take a hot shower before I die.”

Despite the desperate needs of many, Ms. Sukhorukova said that those she was sheltering with pooled their food and water, sharing everything they had.

“We forgot that there are shops, where you can turn on the TV, chat on social networks, take a shower or go to sleep in a real bed.”

Instead, they ate from the same plate so as not to waste water on washing, shared mattresses on the floor.

“It was warmer that way,” she said.

She said she would question everyone she met to find out the latest news.

She finally managed to leave her basement shelter and drove through the city in a friend’s car before joining a convoy of others escaping.

She said she didn’t recognize her city.

“I sat in the basement for too long, and during this time it was completely destroyed,” she wrote, describing bodies in the road, the charred remains of houses, and uprooted trees.  

A senior Kremlin official lashes Poland and calls its leaders ‘vassals’ of the U.S.

WARSAW — Echoing the false history promoted by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to justify his invasion of Ukraine, a senior Kremlin official released an angry diatribe on Monday against Poland, a NATO member country, claiming that it and Russia were bound by cultural, economic and other links but had been driven apart by the machinations of the United States.

The splenetic essay, “On Poland,” was posted on the Telegram channel of Dmitri A. Medvedev, a loyal ally and longtime friend of Mr. Putin who, after stints as Russia’s president and prime minister, now serves as deputy head of the Kremlin’s security council.

Writing that Russia and Poland, both Slavic nations, had a long, if sometimes painful, “common history” that destined them to work together, Mr. Medvedev asserted that Poles had been led astray by “their puppeteers from across the ocean with clear signs of senile insanity.”

The attack included accusations that the Polish political elite, whom he described as “vassals” of Washington, was in the grip of a “pathological Russophobia” that was contrary to the interests of their people. It was posted just days before a visit to Warsaw on Friday by President Biden, whose administration is working closely with Poland to get weapons and other assistance to the Ukrainian government of President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Commentators in Russia’s state news media have been ratcheting up their attacks against Poland since a visit last week to Kyiv by the Polish prime minister and the leader of the country’s governing party. Both had previously cozied up to Kremlin-friendly European politicians on the far right, but since the invasion began last month they have been in the vanguard of rallying support for Ukraine and denouncing Moscow.

After the visit, a foreign affairs analyst for the Russian media outlet Pravda described Poland as the “hyena of Europe” and called for its “denazification,” the Kremlin’s code for forced submission to Moscow. (One of Mr. Putin’s stated justifications for launching the war in Ukraine has been the false claim that Ukraine is run by Nazis.)

Once viewed as a relative moderate eager to develop ties with the West, Mr. Medvedev has now become a particularly belligerent member of Mr. Putin’s inner circle, joining hard-line security chiefs at a Kremlin meeting last month to push publicly for military action against Ukraine.

Anxious to avoid a direct military clash with Russia, NATO has rejected Ukrainian pleas that it deploy warplanes to deter Russian bombing. But fears that Poland, and with it NATO, could get sucked into the war in Ukraine have been escalating: Last week, Russian missiles destroyed a Ukrainian military base not far from the Polish border. A few hours before that, Russia’s deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov warned that convoys of Western arms into Ukraine through bordering NATO countries were “legitimate targets.”

In his Monday diatribe, however, Mr. Medvedev made no overt threats against Poland or NATO. And, unlike Mr. Putin in his prewar historical essay denying the existence of Ukrainians as a separate people, he did not argue that Poles and Russians belonged in a single nation. But he did rake up old grievances, casting Russia as a victim of Polish aggression in the early 17th century, when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth occupied Moscow and accusing Poland of “forgetting” the Soviet role in defeating Nazi Germany.

“History,” he wrote, “is now being redrawn, monuments are being demolished. But the fascist occupation is openly equated with the ‘Soviet.’ It is difficult to come up with more deceitful and disgusting rhetoric, but the Poles succeed.”

He also sent an ominous warning that Poland should make “the right choice” in the interest of peace and prosperity.

“Sooner or later they will understand that hatred of Russia does not strengthen the society, it does not contribute to well-being and tranquillity,” Mr. Medvedev said. “There are no anti-Polish sentiments in Russia and never have been,” he added. 

Anton TroianovskiReporting from Istanbul

Russia summoned the American ambassador to Moscow, John J. Sullivan, to warn that “recent statements” by President Biden about President Vladimir V. Putin had put “Russian-American relations on the verge of breaking,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said. Last week, Biden called Putin a “murderous dictator” and a “pure thug.” 

Ukraine’s foreign ministry accused Russia of forcibly relocating thousands of children from the eastern Donbas region to Russia. Oleg Nikolenko, the ministry's spokesman, said in a statement that 2,389 children were taken from their parents on a single day, March 19. The claim could not be independently confirmed. 

Ukraine’s leader accuses Russia of hijacking a relief convoy.

Volunteers built a tent for humanitarian aid at Freedom Square in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Friday.Credit...Oleksandr Lapshyn/Reuters

Fierce fighting was undermining the struggle to get people out of cities devastated by the war, while Ukrainian officials accused Russia of attacking civilians and relief efforts.

President Volodymyr Zelensky, addressing the nation overnight, said that a relief convoy headed to a city in northeastern Ukraine near Kharkiv had been hijacked by Russian forces and authorities had lost contact with six people in it, suggesting they had been detained.

“Five drivers and one doctor. We will release them,” he said. The claim could not be independently verified, but Russian soldiers have been targeting civilians.

“We will try again and again to deliver to our people what they need,” Mr. Zelensky said.

On Sunday, 7,295 people were evacuated through four humanitarian corridors in the east and south, he said. That includes some 4,000 residents of the embattled southern port city of Mariupol who made it to safety.

But hundreds of thousands remain trapped in Mariupol and Mr. Zelensky said the authorities would try once again on Monday to reach as many people there as they could.

Human Rights Watch on Monday called on Russian forces to ensure that civilians in Mariupol and other cities are not being denied access to their most basic needs.

“Mariupol residents have described a freezing hellscape riddled with dead bodies and destroyed buildings,” Belkis Wille, senior crisis and conflict researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “And these are the lucky ones who were able to escape, leaving behind thousands who are cut off from the world in the besieged city.”

Aid groups raised similar concerns about other parts of Ukraine, as well.

Birgitte Bischoff Ebbesen, the regional European director for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said that vital supplies are needed “to avert an even greater humanitarian catastrophe” across the country.

Many of the people in most dire need were already vulnerable before the conflict.

“They face an even harsher situation as they are losing their homes and their livelihoods, being forced to seek shelter wherever they can, or fleeing their country in search of safety,” she said in a statement. 

A Russian missile strike reduces a Kyiv mall to smoldering ruins.

  KYIV, Ukraine — A Russian missile strike reduced a sprawling shopping mall in Kyiv to a smoldering ruin, one of the most powerful strikes to rock the center of the Ukrainian capital since the war began last month.

City officials said at least eight people were killed, though the toll was likely to rise from the explosion around midnight at the shopping mall, Retroville, in northern Kyiv. It was so powerful that it blew debris hundreds of yards in every direction, shook buildings, and flattened one part of the mall. It turned the parking lot into a sea of flames.