More than 10,000 civilians have died in Mariupol since Russia invaded Ukraine, according to the port city’s mayor. The Associated Press reports:
Speaking by phone Monday to The Associated Press, Mayor Vadym Boychenko also said Russian forces brought mobile cremation equipment to the city to dispose of the bodies, and he accused Russian forces of refusing to allow humanitarian convoys into the city in an attempt to conceal the carnage.
Boychenko said corpses were “carpeted through the streets” of Mariupol and once every one is counted, the death toll could be as high as 20,000.
“The Russians completely destroyed Mariupol and burned it to ashes. At least tens of thousands of Mariupol citizens must have been killed,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said to South Korean lawmakers Sunday night.
The AP adds:
With their offensive in many parts of the country thwarted, Russian forces have relied increasingly on bombarding cities — a strategy that has left many urban areas flattened and killed thousands of people. The war has also shattered Ukraine’s economy, with the World Bank estimating it will shrink by more than 45% this year.
Ukrainian authorities accuse Russian forces of committing atrocities, including a massacre in the town of Bucha, outside Kyiv, airstrikes on hospitals and a missile attack that killed at least 57 people last week at a train station.
In Bucha on Monday, the work of exhuming bodies from a mass grave in a churchyard resumed.
Sima Bahous, executive director of UN Women, said reports of Russian soldiers engaging in rape and sexual violence are on the rise.
“The combination of mass displacement with the large presence of conscripts and mercenaries, and the brutality displayed against Ukrainian civilians, has raised all red flags,” Bahous said.
Some of the worst horrors of the war have taken place in Mariupol, “which lies between the pro-Russia breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in the east, and annexed Crimea in the south,” according to the BBC.
“Seizing the city has been a major goal of the Russian offensive,” notes the outlet.
Last month, Russia bombed a theater in Mariupol where women and children were sheltering. 300 Ukrainians were believed to be killed in the attack. Other pieces of civilian infrastructure in Mariupol have been hit by airstrikes, including hospitals, apartment buildings, and schools.
Following a particularly heinous attack on a maternity ward, a mother and her unborn child died.
“Dropping a bomb on a maternity hospital — it’s the final proof that what is happening is genocide of Ukrainians,” Zelensky said at the time.
Axios adds key context:
The United Nations Human Rights Council, from which Russia was suspended last week, estimates that at least 1,842 civilians have been killed and 2,493 injured during the invasion, though it stressed that its estimates were likely considerably lower than the actual figures because ongoing fighting has delayed it documentation efforts
