Ukraine appeals for help as Mariupol takes a pounding

The besieged port city of Mariupol is under continuous bombardment as Russian forces redouble their efforts to capture it after its leaders refused to surrender, Ukrainian officials said yesterday.The city council said the pounding was turning Mariupol into the “ashes of a dead land”. Russia’s RIA news agency said Russian forces and units of Russian-backed separatists had taken about half of the city, citing a separatist leader.The plight of civilians in Mariupol, home to 400,000 people before the war, grew ever more desperate. Hundreds of thousands are believed to be trapped inside buildings, with no access to food, water, power or heat.“There is nothing left there,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address to Italy’s parliament yesterday.Deputy Mayor Sergei Orlov told CNN the city was under a full blockade and had received no humanitarian aid.“The city is under continuous bombing, from 50 bombs to 100 bombs Russian aircraft drops each day...a lot of death, a lot of crying, a lot of awful war crimes,” Orlov said.The United Nations human rights office in Geneva said yesterday it had recorded 953 civilian deaths and 1,557 injured since the invasion, although the actual toll was believed to be much higher. The Kremlin denies targeting civilians. Western officials said yesterday Russian forces were stalled around Kyiv but making some progress in the south and east. Ukrainian fighters are repelling Russian troops in some places but cannot roll them back, they said.The Mariupol city council gave no details of casualties or damage from the latest bombing. Ukraine says Russian shells, bombs and missiles have struck a theatre, an art school and other public buildings, burying hundreds of women and children sheltering in cellars.Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk, speaking on Ukrainian television yesterday, demanded the opening of a humanitarian corridor for civilians. She said at least 100,000 people wanted to leave Mariupol but could not.Kyiv accused Moscow of deporting residents of Mariupol and separatist-held areas of Ukraine to Russia. Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said Kyiv was investigating the “forcible transfer” of 2,389 children to Russia from the Luhansk and Donetsk regions.Moscow denies forcing people to leave, saying it is taking in refugees.Ukraine also accused Russia of blocking humanitarian access to Kherson, which lies northwest of Crimea and is the only provincial capital it has captured. The Foreign Ministry said Kherson’s 300,000 residents were running out of food.Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told Fox News yesterday the Russians were frustrated by their lack of progress. “They did not expect the Ukrainians to fight back this hard. They thought it would be a lot easier to just walk into Kyiv in a couple of days and take the capital city,” he said.In his speech to Italian lawmakers, Zelensky said the war would bring famine to other countries. Ukraine is one of the world’s biggest grain exporters and the war has caused global prices for staple foods to surge to record levels.“How can we sow (crops) under the strikes of Russian artillery?” he said.Russia on N-useRussia’s security policy dictates that the country would only use nuclear weapons if its very existence were threatened, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told CNN in an interview yesterday.The comment, nearly four weeks after Russia sent its forces into Ukraine, came amid Western concern that the conflict there could escalate into a nuclear war.Peskov made the comment in an English-language interview when asked whether he was confident President Vladimir Putin would not use nuclear weapons.