Ukraine rejects Moscow’s Mariupol ultimatum as
airstrikes hit Odesa and Kyiv
Russia accused of striking residential areas in what
would be first attack on Black Sea port
Jon Henley
@jonhenley
Mon 21 Mar
2022 12.12 GMT
Ukraine has
rejected out of hand an ultimatum from Moscow to surrender the devastated city
of Mariupol, as authorities in Odesa accused Russia of striking residential
areas in what would be the invading forces’ first attack on the Black Sea port.
Odesa city
council said on Monday apartment blocks in the city’s outskirts had been hit by
airstrikes, causing no casualties but starting a fire. Overnight shelling in
Kyiv, reduced a large shopping mall to rubble and killed at least eight people.
Ukraine’s
deputy prime minister Iryna Vereshchuk said the government had “of course”
rejected a Russian ultimatum for people in Mariupol to surrender before 5am on
Monday, but said the situation in the besieged city was “very difficult”.
Ukraine
also turned down Moscow’s offer to open two humanitarian corridors out of
Mariupol in exchange for its residents’ capitulation. Hundreds of thousands of
people have been trapped in the city, many without water, heat or power, for
more than a fortnight. Officials have said at least 2,300 residents have died,
with some buried in mass graves.
“There can
be no question of any surrender, laying down of arms” in the stricken Black Sea
port, Vereshchuk said. Mariupol’s mayor, Piotr Andryushchenko, said in a
Facebook post that he did not need to wait until the 5am deadline to reject the
offer.
As EU
foreign and defence ministers gathered in Brussels to discuss further sanctions
on Moscow, authorities in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, said airstrikes in the Podil
district had flattened a shopping centre and severely damaged several apartment
blocks.
“According
to the information we have at the moment, several homes and one of the shopping
centres were hit,” Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said, adding that rescue
services were still putting out a large fire at the shopping centre.
Ukraine’s
prosecutor general said eight people had died in the bombardment. The
prosecutor also said a Russian shell had struck a chemical plant outside the
eastern city of Sumy at about 3am on Monday, causing a leak in a 50-ton tank of
ammonia.
A Russian
military spokesman, Igor Konashenkov, claimed the leak was a “planned
provocation” by Ukrainian forces to falsely accuse Russia of a chemical attack,
adding that Russian forces had killed 80 foreign and Ukrainian troops in an
overnight cruise missile strike on a military training centre in the Rivne
region of western Ukraine.
Military
experts have warned that Moscow’s forces, denied an early victory, are
increasingly turning to the scorched earth tactics of previous offensives in
Syria and Chechnya, pulverising population centres with airstrikes and
artillery bombardments.
Russia’s
ground advance has stalled along most fronts, with its forces held up by highly
effective Ukrainian resistance and major logistical problems, so far failing to
capture a single major Ukrainian city since the invasion started on 24
February.
Britain’s
Ministry of Defence said on Monday Russia’s assault on Kyiv had largely ground
to a halt, although heavy fighting was continuing near Hostomel, a suburb to
the north-west. It has warned, however, of more “indiscriminate shelling of
urban areas, widespread destruction, and large numbers of civilian casualties”
to come.
The UN has
said more than 10 million people, a quarter of Ukraine’s prewar population,
have been displaced by the conflict, including 3.4 million who have fled
abroad, mainly to Poland. It has also confirmed more than 900 civilian deaths,
though the actual figure is likely be significantly higher.
Conditions
in some encircled and heavily bombarded cities in the south, such as Mariupol,
and east, such as Kharkiv, Sumy and Chernihiv, are atrocious, with whole urban
areas pulverised by airstrikes and artillery shells.
The mayor
of Kharkiv, Igor Terekhov, said hundreds of buildings, many of them
residential, had been destroyed in the country’s second largest city. “It is
impossible to say that the worst days are behind us. We are constantly being
bombed, there was shelling again overnight,” he said.
Manolis
Androulakis, Greece’s consul general in Mariupol and the last EU diplomat to
leave the city, said that what he had seen “I hope no one will ever see.
Mariupol will become part of a list of cities that were completely destroyed by
war. I don’t need to name them: they are Guernica, Coventry, Aleppo, Grozny,
Leningrad.”
Russian
airstrikes have hit a theatre in Mariupol where more than 1,300 civilians were
thought to be sheltering and an art school sheltering a further 400 people.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said on Monday people were “still
under the rubble, and we don’t know how many of them have survived”.
On the
diplomatic front, the US president, Joe Biden, was due to call the leaders of
France, Germany, Italy and Britain on Monday to discuss the war, before
travelling later in the week to Brussels and on to Poland for in-person talks.
EU foreign
and defence ministers were meeting on Monday to discuss imposing further
sanctions on Moscow, in particular whether to introduce an oil embargo. Along
with the US, UK and other western countries, the bloc has imposed four rounds
of punitive measures on Russia, including freezing the Russian central bank’s
assets.
“It’s
unavoidable we start talking about the energy sector, and we can definitely
talk about oil because it is the biggest revenue to Russia’s budget,”
Lithuania’s foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, said as he arrived at the
Brussels meeting.
The EU was
also set to approve a new defence strategy aimed at increasing the bloc’s
capacity to act, including setting up a 5,000-strong rapid reaction force.
“It’s not the answer to the Ukrainian war, but it is part of the answer,” the
bloc’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said.
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