Civilian casualties continued to rise as the war in Ukraine waged on and entered Day 16. Mariupol, Kyiv, Irpin and Bucha faced continued shelling and civilians continued to be evacuated through humanitarian corridors. The civilian death toll in Mariupol has gone past 1,500, news agency AFP reported. The city of Mariupol is even cut off from electricity, heating and water supply and people, according to news agencies, are taking every effort to flee the freezing city.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said that the Ukrainian government will try to send food and essentials for those in Ukraine’s Black Sea coastal city. “Mariupol remains blocked by the enemy. Russian troops did not let our aid into the city and continue to torture our people, our Mariupol residents. Tomorrow we’ll try again. Once again, send food, water and medicine for our city,” Zelensky said.
A resident of the city told news agency AFP that there were corpses lying on the street but there was no one there to tend to them. The office of Mariupol’s mayor even called on Turkey to ask Russia to stop bombing the city. A hospital bombing in Mariupol invited international condemnation while Russia claimed that the hospital was a den of Ukrainian nationalists who were operating from there.
The resident mentioned above also said that there were charred, overturned cars in the streets of Mariupol signalling that Russian forces may have shot the occupants of those cars and even attacked them. The mayor’s office also said that Grad, Smerch and Tochka U rockets were bombarding Mariupol for the last 10 days.
Mariupol is a city which was once home to half a million people with most of its parts in ruins. It was also among those cities which bore the brunt of Russian aggression since the beginning of the invasion. The city is also one of the cultural centres of Ukraine. The city also has deep ties to Russia as it was named after Maria Fyodorovna in 1779. It was initially called Pavlovsk.
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