Russia-Ukraine live updates: Dozens killed after strike on barracks; fighting hinders Mariupol rescues

More than 6,600 people made it through humanitarian corridors in Ukraine on Saturday, said Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk.

The civilians fled through eight corridors, Vereshchuk said, though 10 corridors had been planned earlier in the day. She said shelling hindered evacuation from some areas.

In an earlier update Saturday, Vereshchuk warned that Russian forces had been “treacherously breaking our agreements. So I ask you: If you have the opportunity, use it today.”

There were 4,128 residents of Mariupol, the site of continued devastation in recent days, who reached Zaporozhye, Vereshchuk said, and nearly 500 Mariupol residents were transported from Mangush to Berdyansk.

Vereshchuk said 1,820 people moved out of the Kyiv region. From the Luhansk region, 675 people fled.

She noted plans for Sunday’s evacuations and the delivery of aid and supplies for the Kharkiv region. Mariupol residents, she said, would continue to be sent to Zaporozhye.

Pope Francis visited a group of Ukrainian refugees at the Bambino Gesù children’s hospital in Rome on Saturday afternoon.

Fifty children have arrived at the hospital in the more than three weeks since Russia first invaded Ukraine, the Vatican said, and 19 were still hospitalized Saturday. UNICEF said on Saturday that about 1.5 million children have fled Ukraine. Others have been displaced amid the devastation in Ukraine, said the U.N. children’s agency’s executive director.

New satellite imagery collected Saturday morning shows the damage done to Ukraine’s stately Mariupol Drama Theater during Russian shelling this week. The image, which was provided to The Washington Post by Maxar Technologies, shows more than half the roof collapsed. The remaining portion is mangled, buckling inward. Rubble is visible on both sides of the building, and portions of the interior appear to be burned.

Mariupol, a southern Ukrainian port on the Sea of Azov, had been cut off from the outside world for more than two weeks when a Russian airstrike hit the theater Wednesday.

Hundreds of women, families with young children and the elderly had sought shelter in the theater this week, according to local officials. The Post was not able to verify that account. Little independent reporting is available from the besieged city. Internet access is scarce, if available at all, and many reporters and photographers covering Mariupol have left the city because of safety concerns.

Days after Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Maria, a 37-year-old mother in western Russia, downloaded a virtual private network, an effort to circumvent the blockade she saw descending across the country’s Internet.

The instinct proved correct. As the Kremlin began reversing years of relative Internet freedom and restricting American social networks and Western news sites, the VPN proved a lifeline, allowing her to chat with a friend in the United States and read updates on Facebook and Instagram, refreshing news about the war every 10 to 20 minutes. Maria says that the conflict is a “tragedy” and that reading about it leaves her with “anger, sadness and empathy.”

But Maria says her mother believes what she sees on Russian-state run television, where the Russian invasion is portrayed as a righteous military campaign to free Ukraine from Nazis. The different visions have led to bitter arguments, and after one that left her mother in tears, Maria vowed to stop talking to her about the war.

Some Russians — often with social, educational or professional ties to the United States and Western Europe — are trying to pierce Russian President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda bubble, at times leaving them at odds with their own families, friends and co-workers. The war in Ukraine is deepening the divide that was already present between young, tech-savvy people and an older generation that gets news mostly from TV and has always been more comfortable with Putin’s vision of the country.

About 1.5 million children have fled Ukraine in the three weeks since Russia’s invasion, UNICEF said Saturday, and they face a heightened risk of being trafficked or exploited.

The U.N. agency, which advocates for the welfare of children globally, called for stronger safeguards, such as screening children at border crossings to ensure that minors aren’t being exploited while traveling alone or being separated from family members.

From the start of the invasion on Feb. 24 through Thursday, more than 500 unaccompanied children were identified crossing from Ukraine into Romania, said UNICEF, adding that the number of children separated from their family members probably is much higher.

An estimated 28 percent of trafficking victims around the world are children, according to an analysis by UNICEF and the Inter-Agency Coordination Group against Trafficking in Persons.

Afshan Khan, UNICEF’s regional director for Europe and Central Asia, said in a statement that the war could lead to a “significant spike” in trafficking and an “acute child protection crisis.”

“Displaced children are extremely vulnerable to being separated from their families, exploited, and trafficked. They need governments in the region to step up and put measures in place to keep them safe,” Khan said.

UNICEF announced that it had partnered with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and civil services in the receiving countries to establish the organization’s safety and informational service hubs — known as Blue Dots — for women and separated children.

The war in Ukraine has sparked the fastest-growing refugee crisis since World War II with nearly 3.5 million Ukrainians — mostly women and children — fleeing to neighboring countries including Poland and Romania, while others have continued west to countries such as Germany.

ON THE POLAND-UKRAINE BORDER — There were no passport officers on the dirt road, no customs lane, no signs marking this isolated patch of farmland for what it has become: a clandestine gateway for military supplies entering Ukraine.

“No pictures, no pictures,” shouted a Polish border guard as a convoy of 17 trucks hissed to a halt on a biting morning this week.

Not far from here was a Ukrainian military base where at least 35 people had been killed a few days earlier by a Russian missile barrage, and no one wanted to call attention to this ad hoc border crossing. Washington Post journalists were given permission to observe the delivery on the condition that they turn off the geolocation function on their cameras.

In a call with Turkey’s leader, Russian President Vladimir Putin outlined conditions for a potential cease-fire with Ukraine, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s spokesperson told a news outlet.

Erdogan offered to bring Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky together in Turkey, but Putin wants first to reach an agreement on six topics, Turkish presidential spokesperson Ibrahim Kalin told the newspaper Hurriyet in an interview published Saturday.

Putin’s demands, Kalin said, include that Ukraine pledge its neutrality and not seek to join NATO, an alliance of 30 nations that includes the United States; disarmament; and “denazification” — a reflection of Putin’s baseless claim that Ukraine is led by a fascist government. Putin also reportedly wants the removal of obstacles to the widespread use of the Russian language in Ukraine.

“It is understood that some progress has been made in the first four articles of the ongoing negotiations,” Kalin told Hurriyet. “It is too early to say that there is full agreement or that an agreement is about to be signed.”

What a Russia-Ukraine peace deal might look like

The two more difficult issues, Kalin said, are Putin’s requirement that Ukraine recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the autonomy of two separatist regions in eastern Ukraine. Kalin said Putin may be willing to meet with Zelensky to discuss those topics after they have reached an agreement on the first four.

Turkey has served as a mediator since Russia invaded Ukraine last month. Although it is a member of NATO, Turkey’s relations with Western allies are sometimes strained and it has done little to support Kyiv. Turkey also has points of contention with Russia, including that country’s support for Bashar al-Assad’s government in the Syrian civil war.

The war in Ukraine has unsettled American politics. The degree to which it is changing American politics is the more consequential question for President Biden and the Democrats.

Russia’s brutal and unprovoked aggression against its sovereign neighbor has refocused the world. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has become a figure of international acclaim and admiration. Russian President Vladimir Putin has become an international pariah. NATO has been rejuvenated, and the United States is once again leading the Western alliance.

How much does that matter to American voters, and how much will it matter in the November midterm elections? Today, inflation and other domestic issues remain the main drivers of the upcoming elections. One change the war has brought is that it has frozen the political environment at home and placed some issues — gas prices specifically — into a more-than-purely-domestic context.

We know from scatterings of recent history that at this stage of a conflict like the one that continues to unfold in Ukraine, projections months into the future are risky to foolhardy. Surprise is one certainty of politics.