Russia-Ukraine live updates: Nearly 10 million have fled; Russian forces are in Mariupol, hindering rescues

Ukraine’s top prosecutor accused Russian forces of abducting a Ukrainian journalist reporting on military operations in the country’s eastern and southern regions.

The Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine said Victoria Roshchina’s location was unknown after she was kidnapped Tuesday in the southern port city of Berdyansk by Russian troops and Russia’s Federal Security Service. Criminal proceedings were initiated “on the fact of violation of the laws and customs of war,” the prosecutor said in a statement.

Roshchina had been covering the war for the news organization Hromadske since Russia’s attack began last month, the news outlet reported. On March 11, the outlet said, she was probably traveling from the southeastern region of Zaporizhzhia to the besieged port city of Mariupol to report on the constant shelling and dire humanitarian conditions there.

The next day, Hromadske reported, Roshchina’s colleagues could not contact her. They believe she was in Berdyansk.

Hromadske employees learned Wednesday that Roshchina had been detained by the Federal Security Service, a successor to the former Soviet Union’s KGB.

“For two days we made every effort to release the journalist in a private manner,” Hromadske wrote. “But it turned out to be ineffective. Therefore, we call on the Ukrainian and international community to join in the information and action to the release of Hromadske journalist Victoria Roshchina.”

Elon Musk recently challenged Russian President Vladimir Putin to a one-handed fistfight for the future of Ukraine. But the entrepreneur’s real defense of the besieged country is his effort to keep Ukrainians online with shipments of the Starlink satellite Internet service.

Starlink is a unit of Musk’s space company, SpaceX. The service uses terminals that resemble TV dishes equipped with antennas and are usually mounted on roofs to access the Internet via satellite in rural or disconnected areas.

When war broke out in Ukraine, the country faced threats of Russian cyberattacks and shelling that had the potential to take down the Internet, making it necessary to develop a backup plan. So the country’s minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, tweeted a direct plea to Musk urging him to send help. Musk replied just hours later: “Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route.”

Ukrainian forces continued to put up a defiant defense of their country as Russia’s invasion entered its 24th day Saturday.

Major cities such as Kyiv, Lviv and Kharkiv remain in Ukrainian hands, and Russia’s troops are still “stalled across the country,” the Pentagon said, even as it cautioned that Moscow retains 90 percent of its assembled combat power.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said early Saturday that Russian forces have committed war crimes by blocking critical aid deliveries to Ukraine’s embattled cities. “They will be held accountable for this,” he added.

Meanwhile, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said 10 humanitarian corridors were opened Saturday to help Ukrainians flee the conflict, and she urged residents to take advantage of them.

The world is only starting to grapple with the humanitarian catastrophe caused by the Russian assault. The United Nations said Friday that roughly 9.8 million of Ukraine’s 44 million people have either fled Ukraine or are internally displaced as a result of the fighting.

ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine — Traumatized residents from Mariupol, arriving in a nonstop stream of cars at a humanitarian aid station, described urban fighting and devastation as Ukrainian forces appeared to lose their grip on parts of the battered southern port city.

Those arriving at a way station farther north on Friday and Saturday painted a picture of a city that is no longer fully controlled by Ukrainian forces, with Russian tanks spotted in the streets.

Oksana, 37, who left with her three sons, her sister, brother-in-law and two nieces, said Russian forces had entered the house they were sheltering in to check their documents, parking tanks outside.

Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to the Mariupol mayor’s office, confirmed that Russian tanks were in the city. “It’s difficult to say who is controlling what,” he said. “Mariupol is a battlefield. But we are still defending the city, and we aren’t giving up.”

He said one front line was now downtown, near a theater that was bombed by Russian forces Wednesday. The theater was used to shelter hundreds of civilians, and an unknown number remained trapped under rubble Saturday as fighting raged, officials said.

ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine — Street fighting between invading Russian soldiers and Ukrainian forces is hindering search-and-rescue efforts for the estimated hundreds of civilians who were taking shelter in Mariupol’s Drama Theater when Russia bombed it Wednesday, Ukrainian officials say.

At least 130 civilians were able to climb out of the rubble after the attack, but the fate of the remainder is unknown, according to Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to Mariupol’s mayor.

Rescue work is going “very slowly” due to fighting in the city center, Andryushchenko told The Washington Post on Friday. “How many people are beneath the rubble, we don’t know.”

“Mariupol is a battlefield,” he added. “But we are still defending the city, and we aren’t giving up,”

The underground bomb shelter in Mariupol’s theater had become known as a relative safe haven for increasingly desperate residents, who have been cut off from heat, water, food and electricity for weeks as Russian forces encircle the southern port city. Mariupol stands in the way of connecting Russian-held Crimea with eastern Ukraine.

Maryna Selkova, 41, said the house in which she was sheltering, near the theater and university in the city center, was already on the front line on Wednesday evening. She tried to flee several times but could not because of the fierce fighting.

“It was so scary to come out. Everything was exploding,” she said. “We got back into the basement and tried again later.”

“Our house was shaking,” she said, her 11-year-old son clinging to her neck.

They finally escaped on Thursday morning. “The theater was already bombed when we left,” she said. “We understood then we couldn’t hide anywhere.”

Russia’s Defense Ministry announced Saturday that its forces used a Kinzhal hypersonic missile to destroy an underground storage facility in the Ivano-Frankivsk region of western Ukraine.

President Vladimir Putin, who has invested heavily in rebuilding and equipping Russia’s military during his time in power, has boasted in the past that Russia’s development of hypersonic missiles puts it ahead of the world in military advances.

But Moscow’s problems on the ground in more than three weeks of its war against Ukraine have severely dented Russia’s military reputation.

Moscow released video of the attack near the village of Deliatyn, claiming the facility was an underground arms depot. The claim that a Kinzhal missile was used could not be verified independently.

A Ukrainian air force official confirmed to a local news outlet Saturday that a Russian missile targeted a military warehouse in the Deliatyn area in western Ukraine, but he said it was not yet clear whether the missile was a Kinzhal, the Associated Press reported.

Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov did not elaborate on why the military would use a Kinzhal missile for the target.

Military analyst Rob Lee of the War Studies Department at King’s College London said the missile may have been used to test its capacity in a war situation, or because it had better penetrating capacities than other missiles. He said it might also indicate that Russia is running low on other missiles suitable for such tasks.

Russian officials have made clear that a major priority is to destroy Ukraine’s ammunition supplies, as advanced antitank weapons and other equipment from NATO members and other nations have helped Kyiv to resist Russia’s advance for more than three weeks.

But Russia’s announcement that it used the Kinzhal missile also signals a determination to defeat Ukraine at any cost, underscoring the capacity of Russia to outgun its smaller, poorer neighbor.

Putin has boasted that Russia’s hypersonic missiles cannot be intercepted and are “absolutely invulnerable to any missile defense system.” Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced in January that the first regiment of Russia’s strategic intercontinental ballistic missiles had been fully rearmed with Avangard hypersonic warheads. The Tass state news agency reported last month that a second regiment would be armed with Avangard warheads by the end of the year.

ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine — Traumatized residents from Mariupol, Ukraine, arrived in a nonstop stream of cars at a humanitarian aid station Friday, describing urban fighting and devastation as Ukrainian forces appeared to lose their grip on parts of the battered city.

They arrived in a near-constant convoy at the city of Zaporizhzhia, 140 miles to the northwest, their vehicles marked with white flags and signs reading “children” in hopes they would be spared from attack.

Their accounts provide a glimpse of the situation in a city that has been cut off from communications for more than two weeks.

Evacuees spoke of weeks spent trapped in their basements with little to eat and no electricity or water. They painted a picture of a city that is no longer fully controlled by Ukrainian forces, with Russian tanks spotted in the streets.

LONDON — Former British prime minister Gordon Brown views Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “pariah” and says he is backing calls to establish an international tribunal to hold Putin to account for his invasion of Ukraine.

In an article published Friday in Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper, Brown said that, alongside 140 lawyers and former world leaders, he is supporting efforts to “issue a declaration calling for a special international war crimes tribunal to be set up to arrest Putin and bring him to trial.” He added: “Such a tribunal would show we are serious.”