Russia-Ukraine war latest: Mariupol mayor says more than 10,000 civilians killed; Zelenskiy taking chemical weapons threat ‘seriously’

Almost 5 million children – two-thirds of all Ukrainian children – have fled their homes in the six weeks since Russia’s invasion, the UN children’s agency has said.

Manuel Fontaine, UNICEF’s emergency programs director, said having 4.8 million of Ukraine’s 7.5 million children displaced in such a short time is “quite incredible.” He said it is something he hadn’t before seen happen so quickly in 31 years of humanitarian work.

“They have been forced to leave everything behind — their homes, their schools and, often, their family members,” he told the UN Security Council. “I have heard stories of the desperate steps parents are taking to get their children to safety, and children saddened that they are unable to get back to school.”

The agency said it has also verified the deaths of 142 youngsters, though the number is almost certainly much higher.

Ukraine’s UN ambassador, Sergiy Kyslytsya, claimed Russia has taken more than 121,000 children out of Ukraine and reportedly drafted a bill to simplify and accelerate adoption procedures for orphans and even those who have parents and other relatives.

More than 10,000 civilians have died in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, the city’s mayor has said.

Vadym Boychenko said the death toll could surpass 20,000, as weeks of attacks and a lack of food and supplies have left bodies “carpeted through the streets” in an interview with the Associated Press.

Boychenko also accused Russian forces of having blocked weeks of thwarted humanitarian convoys into the city in an attempt to conceal the carnage there from the outside world.

Mariupol has been hit heavily by Russian attacks and has suffered some of the most brutal assaults of the war.

Boychenko gave new details of recent allegations by Ukrainian officials that Russian forces have brought mobile cremation equipment to Mariupol to dispose of the corpses of victims of the siege.

Russian forces have taken many bodies to a huge shopping centre where there are storage facilities and refrigerators, Boychenko said.

“Mobile crematoriums have arrived in the form of trucks: You open it, and there is a pipe inside and these bodies are burned,” he said.

Speaking to South Korean lawmakers via video link on Monday, Zelenskiy said “tens of thousands” of people had probably been killed in Mariupol. No independent verification of the death toll in the besieged south-eastern city is possible, but if a figure of this magnitude is confirmed it would be by far the highest death toll in any Ukrainian town or city since the war began.

Forces defending the besieged port city said their ammunition was running out. “Today will probably be the last battle,” the 36th Marine Brigade of the Ukrainian armed forces wrote on social media. “It’s death for some of us and captivity for the rest.”

Russian forces are likely to try to take control of the city of Mariupol before entering the Donetsk region, the Ukrainian military has said.

The strategy would be part of an anticipated massive onslaught across eastern Ukraine where Russia is believed to be trying to connect occupied Crimea with Moscow-backed separatist territories Donetsk and Lugansk in Donbas.

According to Ukraine’s latest operational report as of 6am this morning, officials believe Russia is attempting to regroup and relocate troops in Belarus and Russia before carrying out an offensive attack in Donetsk.

Ukrainian forces are “surrounded and blocked”, Myhaylo Podolyak, an official from President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office, tweeted on Monday night.

However, Ukrainian army insisted that “the defence of Mariupol continues” add that Ukrainian soldiers thwarted six Russian attacks in Donetsk and Luhansk in the past 24 hours.

“The connection with the units of the defence forces that heroically hold the city is stable and maintained,” the land forces of Ukraine wrote on Telegram.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin will meet Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko today to discuss the situation in Ukraine and western sanctions, news agencies in Russia and Belarus reported.

Russia has sent tens of thousands of troops from both Russian and Belarusian territory into Ukraine since its forces invaded Ukraine on 24 February.

Lukashenko has insisted that Belarus must be involved in negotiations to resolve the conflict in Ukraine, saying also that Belarus had been unfairly labelled “an accomplice of the aggressor”.

However, the European Union, the United States and others have included Belarus in the sweeping sanctions imposed on Russia.

Lukashenko arrived early on Tuesday in the Amur region in the Russian Far East where he is to meet Putin at the Vostochny Cosmodrome, a Russian spaceport, Belarusian Belta news agency reported.

Hello and welcome back to our live coverage of the war in Ukraine.

I’m Samantha Lock and I will be bringing you all the latest developments as they unfold.

Here is a comprehensive re-cap of where things stand:

• Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy voiced concerns that Russian forces could use chemical weapons in Ukraine but did not confirm whether they had been used in his daily video address late on Monday. “Today, the occupiers issued a new statement, which testifies to their preparation for a new stage of terror against Ukraine and our defenders,” he said. “One of the mouthpieces of the occupiers stated that they could use chemical weapons against the defenders of Mariupol. We take this as seriously as possible.”
• Earlier on Monday evening, Ukrainian authorities claimed Russia dropped a drone carrying a toxic substance on the south-eastern city of Mariupol. Ivanna Klympush, a Ukrainian MP and chair of the parliamentary committee on integration of Ukraine to the EU, said the unknown substance was “most likely” chemical weapons. The reports are so far unconfirmed.
• The Ukrainian Azov Regiment, a unit of the National Guard of Ukraine, accused Russia of using chemical weapons of an “unknown origin”, dropped via an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) on civilians in Mariupol. Azov leader Andriy Biletsky told the Kyiv Independent that three people had signs of chemical poisoning but there appears to be no “disastrous consequences” for their health.
• UK foreign secretary Liz Truss said work was underway to verify details of the alleged attack, adding: “Any use of such weapons would be a callous escalation in this conflict and we will hold Putin and his regime to account.” Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby added that he was aware of the reports but “cannot confirm at this time”.
• More than 10,000 civilians have died in Mariupol, the city’s mayor has said. Vadym Boychenko said the death toll could surpass 20,000, as weeks of attacks and privation leave bodies “carpeted through the streets” in an interview with the Associated Press.
• Zelenskiy partly blamed the Ukrainian loss of life on western nations that had not sent weapons to bolster the war effort. “Unfortunately, we are not getting as much as we need to end this war sooner,” he said. “Time is being lost. The lives of Ukrainians are being lost … And this is also the responsibility of those who still keep the weapons Ukraine needs in their armoury.”
• Ukrainian authorities are warning people not to go near what they say are landmines being dropped on Kharkiv. Zelenskiy also spoke of “hundreds of thousands of dangerous objects” including mines and unexploded shells left by Russian forces in regions in Ukraine’s north.
• The gruesome task of exhuming the bodies of Ukrainian victims from mass graves in Bucha on the outskirts of Kyiv started on Monday. More than 5,800 cases of alleged war crimes against Russian forces are under investigation, Iryna Venediktova, Ukraine’s prosecutor general, told CNN.
• Nearly two-thirds of all Ukrainian children have fled their homes in the six weeks since Russia’s invasion, and the UN has verified the deaths of 142 children, though the number is almost certainly much higher, the UN children’s agency said Monday. That equates to 4.8 million of Ukraine’s 7.5 million children.
• The United Nations has increasingly heard accounts of rape and sexual violence in Ukraine and called for an investigation into violence against women and increased protection for Ukrainian children. Sima Bahous, UN Women executive director, told the UN security council: “The combination of mass displacement with the large pressure results of conscripts and mercenaries and the brutality displayed against Ukrainian civilians has raised all red flags.”
• Ukraine’s ombudswoman for human rights said she had recorded horrific acts of sexual violence by Russian troops in Bucha and elsewhere, including a case in which women and girls were kept in a basement for 25 days, the New York Times reported. Nine of those victims are now pregnant, according to the ombudswoman, Lyudmyla Denisova.
• Three people were killed and eight civilians wounded by Russian strikes in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, the region’s governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said in a post on the Telegram messaging app.
• Ukraine’s eastern city of Kharkiv came under heavy shelling on Monday, resulting in multiple casualties, mayor Ihor Terekhov said. Among the casualties in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, was the death of one child, the region’s mayor said.
• Prominent Russian opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr has been detained in Moscow on charges of disobeying police orders, his lawyer told the independent news outlet Sota Vision on Monday evening.
• France’s foreign ministry has declared six more Russian agents “operating under diplomatic cover” as persona non grata. The six agents are being accused of working against France’s “national interest” after an investigation, Reuters reports.
• Russian forces are focusing on the Donbas region, the US Pentagon said, but have not launched an offensive yet. “They’re repositioning, they’re refocusing on the Donbas,” Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby told reporters. Western officials said they expected Russia to try to “double or perhaps even treble” its forces in Donbas as it shifts forces from Kyiv and elsewhere in the coming weeks.
• Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces are readying themselves for a “last battle” to control the besieged southern Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, Ukraine’s armed forces said.
• The Austrian chancellor, Karl Nehammer, held “direct, open and tough” talks with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in Moscow on Monday. In a statement, Nehammer – the first EU leader to meet with Putin since he ordered his troops to invade Ukraine – was quoted as saying that it was “not a friendly meeting”.
• Moscow said it will not pause its military operation in Ukraine before the next round of peace talks. In an interview with Russian state television, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said he saw no reason not to continue talks with Ukraine but insisted Moscow would not halt its military operation when the sides convene again.