By Yuras Karmanau
Associated Press
In their relentless assault on the port city of Mariupol, Russian forces on Saturday shelled a mosque sheltering more than 80 people, including children, the Ukrainian government said.
Fighting also intensified on the outskirts of the capital, Kiev.
At the moment there was no information about possible victims in the attack on the temple.
Mariupol has seen the greatest miseries of Russia's war in Ukraine as Moscow's constant offensive has prevented repeated attempts to bring food and water to the city and evacuate trapped civilians.
The Ukrainian embassy in Turkey had reported earlier in the day that a group of 86 citizens of the country, including 34 minors, were among those sheltering from the offensive inside the mosque of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and his wife. Roksolana.
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Meanwhile, anti-aircraft sirens sounded throughout the capital region and artillery shelling prompted residents there to run for cover.
Fighting broke out in multiple areas around Kiev.
The British Ministry of Defense said in an intelligence report that Russian forces were about 15 miles (24 kilometers) from the city center and that a larger Russian column north of the city had dispersed, which could form part of an attempt to encircle Kiev.
On the other hand, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, affirmed in a video that the Russian forces had kidnapped the mayor of the southern city of Melitopol, something that the Ukrainian Executive has recalled that it goes against the Geneva Conventions, "which prohibits the taking of civilian hostages during the war.
” “It is a crime against democracy itself
,” Zelenskyy said.
His country has launched a new effort to open humanitarian corridors from several cities, including besieged Mariupol, where civilians are trapped without food or water, though previous attempts have been interrupted by Russian attacks.
The army's slow and devastating attempt to encircle the city and the offensive on other population centers with artillery and airstrikes mirror Russian tactics used in previous campaigns, especially in Syria and Chechnya, to crush armed resistance.
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March 11, 202202:15
The artillery hit the northwestern suburbs of Kiev.
In the town of Vaslkyiv, southwest of the capital, an attack on an ammunition depot caused two columns of smoke, one black and one white.
The incident caused hundreds of small explosions from the detonation of the ammunition.
As of Friday, the death toll in Mariupol exceeded 1,500 people in 12 days of offensive, according to the mayor's office.
A deadly attack on a maternity hospital in this city of 446,000 people this week sparked worldwide outrage and accusations of war crimes.
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The ongoing bombardment forced teams to stop digging trenches for mass graves, so "the dead are not even being buried," the mayor said.
An Associated Press photographer captured the moment a tank appeared to fire directly at an apartment building, engulfing one side in an orange fireball.
Russian forces have attacked at least two dozen hospitals and medical facilities since they invaded Ukraine on February 24, according to the World Health Organization.
Ukrainian authorities reported Saturday that heavy artillery damaged a cancer hospital and several residential buildings in Mykolaiv, a city 303 miles (489 kilometers) west of Mariupol.
The hospital's chief doctor, Maksim Beznosenko, said several hundred patients were in the facility during the attack, but no one was killed.
An explosion is seen at an apartment building after Russian army tank fires in Mariupol, Ukraine, on Friday, March 11, 2022.Evgeniy Maloletka/AP
The invading Russian forces have had more difficulties than expected against the determined Ukrainian fighters.
But Russia's increased military might threatens to reduce the defending forces, despite the continuing flow of weapons and other aid from the West to Ukraine's democratically elected, west-facing government.
The conflict has driven 2.5 million people to flee the country.
Soldiers from both sides are believed to have been among the dead, as well as numerous Ukrainian civilians.
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Rococosmos, the Russian space agency, has appealed to its partners in the International Space Station (ISS) demanding an end to sanctions against Russia, as they endanger this project.
According to the Russian agency Tass, the general director of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, has sent these requirements by letter to the US space agencies (NASA), Canada, and the European Union (ESA), all of them involved in this international project.
With information from
NBC News
and EFE.