Officials in Lviv said seven people were killed in Russian missile strikes on a city in western Ukraine on Monday as the brutal siege of Mariupol in the southeast appears to be in its final stages.
Andriy Sadoviy, the mayor of Lviv, announced “five targeted missile strikes” on the city, a refuge for people fleeing violence in the rest of the country. Maxim Kozitsky, Lviv’s regional governor, said in an update released Monday afternoon that seven people had died in the attacks and 11 others had been injured, including a child. He said Russia had fired four cruise missiles, which according to preliminary information were believed to have been fired from the Caspian region.
The attacks came after Ukrainian authorities claimed that civilians in Mariupol, including children, were taking shelter with the latest group of fighters under a steel plant in the blocked city. About 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers remain, despite a Russian ultimatum to surrender.
The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) also released a video in which Viktor Medvedchuk, the closest ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin in the country, asked to be exchanged for Ukrainian forces and civilians still trapped in Mariupol.
The SBU said Medvedchuk, who escaped house arrest on charges of treason in early war in February, was arrested last week while Russia’s FSB security service tried to evacuate him to Transnistria, a pro-Russian separatist region in Moldova. It added that about 120,000 civilians remained in Mariupol, where Kyiv’s 36th Marine Brigade and the Azov ultranationalist battalion were fighting the Russian siege.
Almost immediately afterwards, Russian television showed a video of Sean Piner and Aidan Aslin, two British fighters captured in Mariupol, who asked British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to exchange them for Medvedchuk. The men said they were treated well, but did not provide further details about the circumstances of their capture.
Mikhail Vershinin, Mariupol’s patrol police chief, told the city’s television channel that civilians had taken refuge in the Azovstal steel plant because “it is a hiding place that allows them to survive for a while” during intense bombings, missiles and artillery attacks on Russia.
“According to my information, [in] there are indeed a large number of civilians on the territory of the Azovstal plant. Including women, children, the elderly and orphans, “he said.
Smoke rises over the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, where civilians are sheltered alongside Ukrainian soldiers who are still fighting the Russians © Alexander Ermochenko / Reuters
Vershinin also told the paper that Russian-Moscow-backed separatist forces, which now control much of the port city, are paying civilians with food to help remove rubble, collect corpses and dig mass graves.
Separately, two Ukrainian officials published photos of a little girl they say lives in bunkers below the Azovstal plant, a Soviet-era facility with concrete and steel infrastructure that allowed fighters in Mariupol to survive the war’s most intense bombings.
“Meet Alice, she is four years old. She spent 50 days of her life with her mother in a bunker on the territory of the Azovstal plant under round-the-clock bombing, “wrote Arsen Avakov, a longtime former interior minister, in a Facebook post that included a video of a little girl he said was sent by Mariupol. Mikhail Podoliak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, posted a photo of the same child on Twitter.
Ukrainian and Russian allegations of conflict could not be confirmed. Ukrainian Marines, soldiers, border guards and fighters from the Azov Battalion paramilitary group are among the fighters remaining in Mariupol. A senior figure in Azov’s liaison with the militants told the Financial Times over the weekend that Ukrainian troops in the city were short of food, drinking water and medicine.
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Moscow has also stepped up attacks elsewhere in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, where Putin’s troops are trying to gain territory after failing to gain control of the capital Kyiv during the first phase of the war.
Also Monday, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said peace talks with Ukraine were delayed, almost three weeks after the two sides met in Istanbul. The talks took place online last week.
“Unfortunately, the Ukrainian side does not show much consistency in terms of what was agreed,” Peskov told reporters, according to Interfax. “But the military operation continues.”
Putin has given an honorary title to one of the units Ukraine claims to be responsible for war crimes. In a statement to the 64th Motorized Rifle Brigade, Putin said the appointment of “Guardsmen” was a “high honor and recognition of your merits.” [and] mass heroism]”.
Ukraine’s armed forces say the brigade is responsible for “mass killings and torture” in the city of Bucha, where it found hundreds of civilians killed when Russia withdrew earlier this month.
Additional reports from Max Sedon
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