Ukraine crisis: Zelensky says Russia wages 'terror', Mariupol says thousands deported

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia’s siege of the port city of Mariupol was “a terror that will be remembered for centuries to come”, while local authorities said thousands of residents there had been taken by force to Russia.

“Over the past week, several thousand Mariupol residents were deported onto the Russian territory,” the city council said in a statement on its Telegram channel late on Saturday.

Reuters could not independently verify the claim.

Russian news agencies have said buses have carried several hundred people Moscow calls refugees from the strategic port on the Sea of Azov to Russia in recent days.

Some 400,000 people have been trapped in Mariupol for more than two weeks, sheltering from heavy bombardment that has severed central supplies of electricity, heating and water, according to local authorities.

Rescue workers were still searching for survivors in a Mariupol theatre that local authorities say was flattened by Russian air strikes on Wednesday. Russia denies hitting the theatre or targeting civilians.

Russia’s defence ministry said on Friday that its forces were “tightening the noose” around Mariupol and that fighting had reached the city centre.

In a late night broadcast, Zelensky said the siege of Mariupol would “go down in history of responsibility for war crimes”.

“To do this to a peaceful city... is a terror that will be remembered for centuries to come.”

Still, he said, peace talks with Russia were needed although they were “not easy and pleasant”.

Russian forces have taken heavy losses since Feb. 24, when President Vladimir Putin launched what he calls a “special operation” aimed at demilitarising Ukraine and purging it of what he sees as dangerous nationalists. Ukraine and the West say Putin launched an aggressive war of choice.

Long columns of troops that bore down on the capital Kyiv have been halted in the suburbs.

British intelligence believes Russia has been taken aback by Ukraine’s resistance to its atatck and is now “pursuing a strategy of attrition”, said Britain’s defence attache to the United States.

On Saturday, Russia said its hypersonic missiles had destroyed a large underground depot for missiles and aircraft ammunition in the western Ivano-Frankivsk region. Hypersonic weapons can travel faster than five times the speed of sound, and the Interfax agency said it was the first time Russia had used them in Ukraine.

A spokesperson for the Ukrainian Air Force Command confirmed the attack, but said the Ukrainian side had no information on the type of missiles used.

ALSO READ:

The EU measures are part of a wider sanctions effort by Western nations aimed at squeezing Russia’s economy and starving its war machine.