Ukraine has rejected Russian demands that troops in the Black Sea port Mariupol lay down their weapons and surrender in return for letting tens of thousands of civilians trapped in the heavily besieged city leave safely – saying promises of amnesty cannot be trusted and they are determined to fight ‘to the last soldier’.
Russian Colonel-General Mikhail Mizintsev laid out Moscow’s offer late Sunday, saying Ukrainian troops and ‘foreign mercenaries’ who laid down their arms and raised white flags would be allowed to leave via ‘humanitarian corridors’. Civilians would then be evacuated afterwards. He gave Ukraine until 5am to respond.
Daria Morozova, of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, said that all of those who remained behind would face a military tribunal for ‘all the crimes of the Ukrainian national battalions.’ She said inspectors would be sent into the city once it had been ‘completely cleansed’ by Russian troops.
But Mariupol rejected the demands within minutes, with Pyotr Andryushenko – an adviser to the city’s mayor – saying that Russian promises of amnesty could not be trusted and that troops defending the city were determined to fight down to the last man.
Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk called on Russia to stop ‘wasting time on eight pages of letters’ and open humanitarian corridors for civilians to leave the city instead of using them as bargaining chips. Mariupol has been under siege for three weeks with little access to food or water and no power, with multiple attempts to evacuate civilians failing amid claims Russia had bombed and shelled the escape routes.
She told news outlet Ukrainska Pravda: ‘There can be no talk of any surrender, laying down of arms. We have already informed the Russian side about this.’ Mizintsev warned of a ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ that will be faced by all those who remain behind after Moscow’s deadline for surrender elapsed.
His offer was made just hours after a Russian missile strike hit a school sheltering some 400 people, though there was no immediate word on casualties. Last week, Russia had bombed a theatre in the city being used to shelter children – potentially trapping hundreds of people in underground bomb shelters. There is still no word on casualties from that strike either.
And it came as Ukrainian officials claimed that people are being forcibly evacuated from parts of the city under Russian control into parts of the country currently occupied by Putin’s forces – or into Russia itself. ‘Several thousand’ people have so-far been taken, the city council claimed, before being processed through ‘filtration camps’ and sent to ‘remote cities’ in Russia where they will be obliged to stay for years and work for free.
European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell on Monday decried Russia’s attack on the Ukrainian port city Mariupol as ‘a massive war crime’, as the bloc discussed imposing more sanctions on Moscow. ‘[They are] destroying everything, bombarding and killing everybody,’ Borrell said at a meeting of EU foreign ministers.
Russia has also kept up its bombardment of other Ukrainian cities today, hitting a shopping mall and several apartments in the capital Kyiv in the early hours – reducing the former to rubble. Bombings in the surrounded city of Sumy also hit an ammonia plant, sparking an evacuation.
