Russia strikes near Ukraine’s capital as siege of other cities goes on

Russian forces pounding the port city of Mariupol shelled a mosque that was sheltering more than 80 people, including children, the Ukrainian government said on Saturday.

Fighting also raged in the outskirts of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and Russia kept up its bombardment of other resisting cities.

There was no immediate word of casualties from the shelling of Mariupol’s city-centre mosque.

The encircled city of 446,000 people has endured some of Ukraine’s worst misery since Russia invaded, with unceasing barrages thwarting repeated attempts to bring in food, water and medicine, evacuate trapped civilians and even bury the dead.

“They are bombing it (Mariupol) 24 hours a day, launching missiles. It is hatred. They kill children,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said during a video address.

An Associated Press journalist in Mariupol witnessed tanks firing on an apartment building and was with a group of hospital workers who came under sniper fire on Friday.

A worker shot in the hip survived, but conditions in the hospital were deteriorating: electricity was reserved for operating tables, and people with nowhere else to go lined the hallways.

Meanwhile, French and German leaders spoke on Saturday with Russian President Vladimir Putin in a failed attempt to reach a ceasefire.

According to the Kremlin, Mr Putin laid out terms for ending the war, including Ukraine’s demilitarisation and its ceding of territory, among other demands.

Ukraine’s military said on Saturday that Russian forces captured Mariupol’s eastern outskirts, tightening the armed squeeze on the strategic port.

Taking Mariupol and other ports on the Azov Sea could allow Russia to establish a land corridor to Crimea, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014.

Mr Zelensky encouraged his people to keep up their resistance, which many analysts said has prevented the rapid offensive and military victory the Kremlin likely expected while planning to invade Russia’s ex-Soviet neighbour.

“The fact that the whole Ukrainian people resist these invaders has already gone down in history, but we do not have the right to let up our defence, no matter how difficult it may be for us,” he said.

Later on Saturday, Mr Zelensky reported that 1,300 Ukrainian soldiers have died in fighting since the February 24 start of the Russian invasion.

Mr Zelensky again deplored Nato’s refusal to declare a no-fly zone over Ukraine and said Ukraine has sought ways to procure air defence assets, though he did not elaborate.

Mr Zelensky also accused Russia of employing “a new stage of terror” with the alleged kidnapping of the mayor of Melitopol, a city 119 miles west of Mariupol.

After residents of the occupied city demonstrated for the mayor’s release on Saturday, the Ukrainian leader called on Russian forces to heed the calls.

“Please hear in Moscow!” Mr Zelensky said. “Another protest against Russian troops, against attempts to bring the city to its knees.”

In multiple areas around the capital, artillery barrages sent residents scurrying for shelter as air raid sirens wailed.

Britain’s Defence Ministry said Russian ground forces that had been massed north of Kyiv for most of the war had edged to within 15 miles of the city centre and spread out, likely to support an attempted encirclement.

As artillery pounded Kyiv’s north-western outskirts, black and white columns of smoke rose south-west of the capital after a strike on an ammunition depot in the town of Vasylkiv caused hundreds of small explosions.

A frozen food warehouse just outside the capital also was struck in an apparent effort to target Kyiv’s food supply.

Ukraine’s military and volunteer forces have been preparing for an all-out assault.

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Thursday that about two million people, half the metropolitan area’s inhabitants, had left and that “every street, every house … is being fortified”.

Mr Zelensky said on Saturday that Russia would need to carpet-bomb the Ukrainian capital and kill its residents to take the city.

“They will come here only if they kill us all,” he said. “If that is their goal, let them come.”

Mr Putin held a 90-minute call with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Saturday.

Mr Putin spoke about “issues related to agreements under discussion to implement the Russian demands” for ending the war, the Kremlin said without providing details.

For ending hostilities, Moscow has demanded that Ukraine drop its bid to join Nato and adopt a neutral status; acknowledge the Russian sovereignty over Crimea, which it annexed from Ukraine in 2014; recognise the independence of separatist regions in the country’s east; and agree to demilitarise.

Mr Zelensky told Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett on Saturday that he would be open to meeting Mr Putin in Jerusalem to discuss an end to the war, but that there would first have to be a ceasefire.

Mr Bennett recently met in Moscow with Mr Putin, who has ignored previous offers of talks from Mr Zelensky.

Russia’s slow tightening of a noose around Kyiv and the bombardment of other cities mirror tactics that Russian forces have previously used in other campaigns, notably in Syria and Chechnya, to crush armed resistance.

The Ukrainian Embassy in Turkey said 86 Turkish nationals, including 34 children, were among the people who had sought safety in Mariupol’s mosque of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and his wife Roksolana, which was modelled on one of the most famous and largest mosques in Istanbul.

The death toll in Mariupol passed 1,500 on Friday, from 12 days of attack, the mayor’s office said.

With Mariupol’s electricity, gas and water supplies knocked out, aid workers and Ukrainian authorities described an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe.

Aid group Doctors Without Borders said Mariupol residents are dying from a lack of medication and are draining heating pipes for drinking water.

Russian forces have hit at least two dozen hospitals and medical facilities since invading Ukraine on February 24, according to the World Health Organisation.

Ukrainian officials reported on Saturday that heavy artillery damaged a cancer hospital and several residential buildings in Mykolaiv, a city 304 miles west of Mariupol.

The hospital’s head doctor, Maksim Beznosenko, said several hundred patients were in the facility during the attack, but no one was killed.

The Russian invaders appear to have struggled far more than expected against determined Ukrainian fighters. Still, Russia’s stronger military threatens to grind down Ukrainian forces, despite an ongoing flow of weapons and other assistance from the West for Ukraine’s westward-looking, democratically elected government.

A senior Russian diplomat warned that Moscow could attack foreign shipments of military equipment to Ukraine.

Speaking on Saturday, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Moscow has warned the United States “that pumping weapons from a number of countries it orchestrates isn’t just a dangerous move — it’s an action that makes those convoys legitimate targets”.

Russia’s troops are likely to be bolstered soon from abroad.

Denis Pushilin, the Russia-backed head of a separatist region in eastern Ukraine, said on Saturday that he expects “many thousands” of fighters from the Middle East to join the rebels and fight “shoulder-to-shoulder” against the Ukrainian army.

Thousands of soldiers on both sides are believed to have been killed along with many civilians.

At least 2.5 million people have fled the country, according to the United Nations refugee agency.

The Ukrainian chief prosecutor’s office said on Saturday at least 79 children have been killed and nearly 100 have been wounded.

Most of the victims were in the Kyiv, Kharkiv, Donetsk, Sumy, Kherson and Zhytomyr regions, the office said, noting that the numbers are not final because active fighting continues.