Russia-Ukraine live updates: Russia tells Mariupol to surrender, but Ukrainian official is defiant

RIGA, Latvia — In a dingy Russian classroom with worn-out rugs, elementary school students lined up to form the shape of the letter Z: the symbol used on much of Russia’s military equipment in Ukraine and an emblem of support at home, showing up from bus stops to car stickers to corporate logos.

Now it has become part of the classroom lessons as the Kremlin expands its anti-Ukraine propaganda to students as young as kindergarten age. It’s another front in President Vladimir Putin’s sweeping crackdowns to criminalize dissent and enforce an unquestioning brand of patriotism even as Russia grows increasingly isolated.

Over the past three weeks, thousands of posts appeared on Russian social media featuring schoolchildren — up to high school age — attending special “patriotic lessons” or posing for pictures forming Z and V-for-victory signs.

“I’m for the president. I’m for Russia!” a teacher exclaims in a clip posted Saturday by an official page for the Nizhny Novgorod region, about 250 miles east of Moscow.

“We are united and therefore invincible!” a choir of young children screams into the camera, holding balloons in the white-blue-red colors of the Russian flag.

Russia’s education minister, Sergey Kravtsov, openly described schools as central to Moscow’s fight to “win the information and psychological war” against the West. At the same time, Russia has imposed laws against spreading “fake” news or “discrediting” the Russian armed forces — prompting many journalists and activists to leave Russia.

The country’s Internet regulator, Roskomnadzor, ordered media outlets to delete reports using the words “invasion” or “war” and only rely on official government sources, which call the Ukraine war a “special operation.” Russian state TV removed all entertainment shows from its programming, filling the broadcasts with propaganda-filled talk shows and state-vetted news.

After weeks of relentlessly bombarding Mariupol, Russia on Sunday called for Ukrainian forces to surrender and flee the city or risk further attacks and a “military tribunal.”

The ultimatum, issued through Russian state media, came after Russian forces had entered every neighborhood in Mariupol, a strategically valuable city on Ukraine’s southeastern coast. The assault — which has reduced large swaths of the city to rubble, left civilians dead on the streets and spawned a humanitarian catastrophe — has descended into house-to-house guerrilla warfare, officials said Sunday.

Moscow said Mariupol’s leaders faced a “historic choice”: either concede to Russian troops or be considered “with the bandits” and face trial in a Russian military court, according to the state media reports, which disseminate Kremlin communications. Russia requested an official response from Ukrainian authorities by 5 a.m. Moscow time Monday, which is 10 p.m. Eastern time Sunday.

Late Sunday, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk told the news outlet Ukrayinska Pravda that Ukraine would not surrender, and she reiterated calls for open and unconditional evacuation routes from the city.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky thanked Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis on Sunday for raising millions to help refugees and shared a photo of his video call with the star couple.

The actors have raised nearly $35 million with a GoFundMe fundraiser, surpassing a $30 million goal in a couple of weeks. Zelensky tweeted Sunday that the pair “were among the first to respond to our grief. … They inspire the world.” Kutcher retweeted the post.

Kunis identifies herself on the fundraising page as a “proud Ukrainian” whose family came to the United States in 1991, when she was a child. The fundraiser will go toward two groups: Flexport.org, which is organizing supply shipments to refugees in countries around Ukraine, and the rental company Airbnb, which is offering free housing to Ukrainians fleeing the war, Kunis said.

Nearly 1 in 13 Ukrainians have fled the country during Russia’s invasion, according to the United Nations.

“While we are witnessing the bravery of Ukrainians, we are also bearing witness to the unimaginable burden of those who have chosen safety,” Kunis wrote.

KYIV, Ukraine — Since Russia invaded Ukraine, thousands of Americans and other foreign nationals have signed up to fight for Ukraine, answering a call to action by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Now, as the conflict enters its fourth week, foreign volunteers are flowing into the capital, signing contracts and receiving weapons and combat training before getting deployed to one of the numerous front lines of the war.

They have been compared to the 32,000 foreigners, mostly Americans and Europeans, many of them equally unprepared, who joined the republican forces in Spain’s 1936-39 civil war. That conflict became a losing battle against nationalists led by General Francisco Franco, with the support of Nazi Germany and the fascist Italian government of Benito Mussolini.

In Ukraine’s brutal modern war, though, the romance of adventure and political convictions can quickly vanish as volunteers get pounded by airstrikes, Grad rockets and artillery shells, or engage in urban warfare on the streets of cities.

While some experienced American veterans of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are said to be among the volunteers, many of these would-be fighters are novices at best.

More than 3.3 million Ukrainians have fled the country since the Russian invasion on Feb. 24, according to the U.N. refugee agency, amounting to nearly 1 in 13 people. Most have fled to Poland, but more than a million have escaped to other neighboring countries, including about 185,000 to Russia.

More than 7,000 people were evacuated through “humanitarian corridors” on Sunday, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said late in the day, many of them from the port city of Mariupol.

Ukrainian officials in Mariupol say Russian forces have reduced much of the city to rubble and killed thousands of civilians. On Sunday, they said that Russian forces have entered all of the city’s civilian neighborhoods and that Russia controls surrounding territory.

Vereshchuk said Sunday that nearly 4,000 Mariupol residents made it to Zaporizhzhia, about 130 miles northwest. As many as 50 buses will try to evacuate Mariupol residents on Monday, she said.

Ukraine’s Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security said about 7,300 people were evacuated Sunday using four of seven planned corridors for evacuees and supplies. Some routes were again disrupted by shelling, it said on Telegram.

Vereshchuk, who posts daily updates on evacuations to Telegram, said a route out of Borodyanka, a community northwest of Kyiv, was thwarted for a second day.

Russian state media outlet Tass said a Russian official on Sunday announced that humanitarian corridors from Mariupol would start operating at 10 a.m. Moscow time Monday, heading east and west. Tass attributed the announcement to Mikhail Mizintsev, head of Russia’s National Defense Control Center, and said people would be free to choose a route toward Kyiv-controlled areas.

The Mariupol city council has said thousands of residents are being forcibly deported to Russia. The Washington Post could not verify that assertion Sunday. Ukraine’s leaders have repeatedly accused the Kremlin of violating cease-fire agreements meant to allow civilians out of battered cities, and they have rejected proposals for evacuations into Russia and its ally Belarus.