The massacres against the population are repeated every day and have caused ten million Ukrainians to be forced to flee their homes.
The British intelligence services advanced it on Saturday and twenty-four hours later it was confirmed by the Russian infantry and aviation. Civilians have also become a target of war in a change of tactics by Vladimir Putin to accelerate the invasion, stalled in the cities of the southeast and still far from reaching the capture of kyiv. The massacres against the population are repeated every day, becoming habitual. The Kremlin no longer even bothers to deny these insensitive war actions that hit residential areas or facilities that serve as shelters for those who have been forced by terror to flee their homes. Not even the requests for help from those who can no longer are respected.
The disputed Lugansk region became the blackest scenario this Sunday. Local authorities blamed Russia for the death of 56 people due to the impact of a projectile against a nursing home in the town of Kreminna, when a Russian tank attacked “in a cynical and deliberate manner.” “They simply stood in front of the house and started shooting,” detailed the head of the Lugansk civil-military administration, Serhi Gaidai, who also denounced that fifteen survivors were “kidnapped by the occupation forces” and transferred to the municipality of Svatove .
The area of the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk has received at least 32 bombings in the last few hours. They left around twenty civilians injured, according to a statement collected by the Russian agency TASS.
Nor did spring come to beleaguered Mariupol this Sunday as it did to the rest of the world. Russia is determined to turn the port city on the Sea of Azov into a new Sarajevo and unleashes its full potential on it without discriminating against whites. She is willing not to leave a building standing, to the point that her projectiles targeted an art school that housed four hundred people, as reported by the City Council without specifying the fate of those who were there. However, some local officials described a destroyed building and women, children and the elderly trapped under its rubble.
Objective, the shelters
The attack against the municipal theater registered on Wednesday was immediately recalled and where it is believed that there were 1,300 people. Most of them were not hit as they were in an underground shelter built in the foundations, but yesterday the fate of the 130 civilians who could not be located was still unknown. The building was marked as a civilian shelter, with the word ‘children’ written in Russian on its forecourt.
Moscow announced for the second consecutive day that it had used hypersonic missiles, although it specified that it was aimed at the city of Mikolaiv. On Saturday he used them against the Ivano-Frankivsk region, in the west of the country. According to the United States, this is the first known use of this type of weapon in combat.
“Doing this to a peaceful city, what the occupiers have done, is an act of terror that will be remembered for centuries,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his evening address to the nation. “The more Russia resorts to terror against Ukraine, the worse the consequences will be,” he added, denouncing the suffocating siege of Mariupol. “She is a victim of acts of terror,” he noted.
Local authorities also said that some residents are being forcibly taken to Russia and stripped of their Ukrainian passports. “They are sent to filtration camps, checking their phones and confiscating documents,” said Pavlo Kyrylenko, head of the Donetsk regional administration.
He further described how a group of children, mostly orphans, who were locked in the basement of a city clinic, were evacuated to an area held by pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country. Most of the children came from orphanages in the region, but from the part that was not under the control of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR).
The strategic coastal city, which would allow the creation of a corridor with Crimea, has been surrounded by forces that are constantly bombing it for three weeks. It is already a symbol of the horror of the invasion when food, water and heating are scarce. Statistics speak of at least 2,300 dead people, most of whom had to be buried in mass graves.
The urban center has been cut off from the Sea of Azov and a huge steel plant, the largest on the continent, has also been devastated. The fall of Mariupol would be the biggest victory of Putin’s soldiers in the campaign. However, they have not just taken the city, as has happened in the case of others in the region that are resisting after more than three weeks of the largest ground invasion in Europe since World War II. For this reason, during the twenty-fifth day of the operation, the Russian Army intensified the attacks on the cities, without ruling out the areas where the civilian population is sheltered.
humanitarian tragedy
The humanitarian tragedy grows exponentially on the offensive. More than 900 civilians have died and at least 1,400 have been injured, according to the latest balance of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. The deceased have been identified as 179 men, 134 women, 25 boys and 11 girls, as well as 39 children and 514 adults pending identification. Ukraine raises the number of minors killed to 115.
The United Nations notes that the majority of civilian casualties were caused by the use of “wide impact area” explosive weapons, through heavy artillery and the use of rocket platforms, as well as air strikes.
For his part, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, confirmed that ten million Ukrainians have already fled their homes, either to other countries as refugees or within Ukraine as internally displaced persons. “Among the responsibilities of those who wage wars around the world, is the suffering inflicted on civilians who are forced to flee their homes,” Grandi lamented.
More than 3.3 million Ukrainians have left the country since the beginning of the Russian invasion. Of these, more than two million have been taken in by Poland and another half million are in Romania.
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