Russia-Ukraine live updates: Russian forces are now shelling Mariupol from the sea

A Russian court convicted top Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny of fraud and contempt of court and sentenced him Tuesday to nine more years in prison, elevating his team’s fears for his life while in detention.

“The whole world knows that this trial has nothing to do with the law,” Navalny ally Ruslan Shaveddinov said on YouTube in a live commentary on the court hearing immediately after the sentence was announced. “We see that Alexei will be held in prison for many more years; they hope to do that. We can’t turn a blind eye to this, as we see that everything is headed toward a very sad end of our country.”

The hearing took place in a penal colony in Pokrov, about 70 miles east of Moscow, where Navalny is already serving a 2½-year sentence for violating his parole.

The Russian military has begun shelling Mariupol from ships in the Sea of Azov, according to a senior Pentagon official, a new development in the assault on the besieged port city on Ukraine’s southeast coast.

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under terms set by the Pentagon, said that surface ships positioned in the Sea of Azov “have been shelling into Mariupol, and that wasn’t the case yesterday.” The official counted five to seven Russian warships in the Sea of Azov, probably including a minesweeper and a couple of tank landing ships.

Mariupol continues to see some of the worst bombardment in Ukraine, as the Russian invasion approaches the one-month mark. The city is an “anchor” for the Russian effort to close off the region to Ukrainian forces, the senior defense official said — though forces loyal to Moscow have yet to assert control over it.

Russian forces have not attempted to shell other population centers from the sea in the manner that Mariupol has come under assault. The official said that there was no similar shelling of Odessa, another strategically important city on Ukraine’s southwestern coast, and no evidence of an imminent amphibious assault on that city.

The official said that there were about 21 Russian ships in the Black Sea, and that some of those were suffering from the same problems that have plagued the rest of the Russian military operating in Ukraine. Among those are fuel problems and food shortages — and the official noted that in some places, Russian troops might even be suffering from frostbite.

The official said that Russia has slightly less than 90 percent of the combat power it had positioned in the areas around Ukraine before the invasion, raising the possibility that Moscow could try to reinforce its assets in the near future.

Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine and lately an international symbol of courage and duty, got his start in politics in a surprising yet wildly on-the-nose way: by playing the president of Ukraine on TV. In 2015, Zelensky created and starred in “Servant of the People,” which told the story of a high school history teacher who gets elected to the country’s highest office, and the first of the show’s three seasons returned to Netflix on Friday.

The show enjoyed immense popularity in Ukraine, and its ambling, vérité style gives it both the farcical spirit of “Veep” and the earnest optimism of “Parks and Recreation.” During the war with Russia, while many of the cities and landmarks the show references are under siege, it can feel like both a welcome, entertaining distraction and a bittersweet tribute.

Watching “Servant of the People” can also be enlightening for viewers around the globe. Here are three major lessons the show illustrates about both Ukraine and the man who has become its wartime leader.

United Nations Secretary General António Guterres described the war in Ukraine as “unwinnable” Tuesday, calling for an end to the fighting and for serious negotiations at the “peace table.”

In the nearly one month since Russian began its invasion, Guterres told reporters that the fighting has only become more “destructive and more unpredictable.” The Ukrainian people, he said, are “enduring a living hell — and the reverberations are being felt worldwide with skyrocketing food, energy and fertilizer prices threatening to spiral into a global hunger crisis.”

He spoke of Mariupol, the Ukrainian port city on the Sea of Azov that has been the site of continued destruction, with strikes hitting a maternity ward and a theater that served as a shelter, and where the conflict has devolved into house-to-house warfare.

The city has been “relentlessly bombed, shelled and attacked,” he said. “For what? Even if Mariupol falls, Ukraine cannot be conquered city by city, street by street, house by house.”

Continuing the war, the U.N. secretary general said, is “morally unacceptable, politically indefensible and militarily nonsensical.”

At least 62 health-care facilities have been hit in Ukraine as of March 18, the World Health Organization said Tuesday. Fifteen people were killed and 37 injured in the attacks, which all occurred since Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24, the organization said.

“Attacks on health care violate international law and endanger lives,” the WHO said in an email. “Even in times of conflict, we must protect the sanctity and safety of health care, a fundamental human right.”

The WHO includes in its figure attacks on health-related transport, personnel, patients, supplies and warehouses, along with physical buildings such as hospitals. Additional incidents are under review, the organization said.

Ukrainian Health Minister Viktor Liashko told local media Tuesday that 10 hospitals had been destroyed in Russian attacks. The Washington Post could not independently verify that claim.

The WHO said it does not share the exact location of or identify the health-care facilities to protect the security and confidentiality of sources and victims.

Among the war crime allegations against Russia is a March 9 strike that Ukrainian officials say tore through a maternity hospital in the southern city of Mariupol, killing at least three people and injuring 17. One woman wounded in the attack died days later after giving birth, the Associated Press reported. Her newborn also died.

The White House has issued its starkest warning that Russia may be planning cyberattacks against critical-sector U.S. companies amid the Ukraine invasion. There’s “evolving intelligence” that the Kremlin is actively exploring its cyberattack options, President Biden said in a statement, warning that companies have a “responsibility to strengthen the cybersecurity and resilience of the critical services and technologies on which Americans rely.”

Deputy national security adviser Anne Neuberger described the alert as a “call to action” for companies to raise their cyberdefenses, during a White House news briefing. She tied it to U.S. intelligence releases in recent months aimed at shining light on Russian planning. Biden later warned that he believes a Russian cyberattack “is coming,” per CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.

The warning reflects a grave concern that U.S. companies aren’t sufficiently prepared to withstand a Russian cyber assault — even after years of concerted pressure from government cyber officials that ramped up even further in the run-up to the Ukraine invasion.

Forest fires have broken out around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Ukraine’s parliament said Monday, raising fears that they could spread radiation.

At least seven fires within the plant’s exclusion zone have been recorded based on satellite imagery from the European Space Agency, parliament said in a statement, blaming Russian forces who captured the site in February.

Ukrainian officials and firefighters could not carry out their usual functions in the area to extinguish the fires due to Russian control of the plant, the update added. It also warned that fires within “a 10-kilometer radius” (6.2 miles) of significant radioactive waste and contamination could pose a “particular danger.”

The World Health Organization is calling on the European Union to help countries including Moldova that are taking in waves of refugees from Ukraine as the border nations feel the weight of the influx.

“Our priority is to help ensure Moldova and all countries involved in the humanitarian response have the infrastructure and expertise to face this challenge, which is placing a huge strain on resources, both human and financial,” Hans Kluge, the WHO regional director for Europe, said Tuesday in Moldova — a small country on Ukraine’s southern border that has received more than 360,000 refugees.

Kluge said he stressed to key donors including the E.U. “that Moldova needs urgent assistance in tackling this emergency” and bolstering the health system.

The United Nations estimates that the Russian onslaught has displaced 10 million people in Ukraine, including 3.5 million who have fled to neighboring countries. Most have left Ukraine via Poland, where officials say the exodus is stretching the capacity of reception centers and volunteers.