Russia-Ukraine live updates: Russian forces close in on Mariupol, widen scope of attacks

Russian troops advanced around Chernihiv and toward eastern Kyiv; they also moved northeast from Kherson in the south. Shelling in Mariupol and Kharkiv continued.

Civilians made their way through most of the humanitarian corridors from cities across Ukraine on Saturday, the government said, after days of stalled attempts to move people away from bombarded areas.

Nine of the 14 proposed corridors worked as designed, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said, a notable development after officials had repeatedly reported that Russia was violating cease-fire agreements designed to provide civilians safe passage out of bombarded cities. Vereshchuk said nearly 13,000 people were moved Saturday, nearly twice the amount who had made it out of a smaller number of cities the day before.

“Which of course very, very much gives us hope,” she said.

Nearly 8,000 were evacuated from Sumy in northeastern Ukraine, while the corridors leading from Enerhodar, Vorzel and Irpin were not clear, Vereshchuk said.

One of the highest-profile evacuation attempts, from the southeastern port city of Mariupol, remains impeded.

“We are keeping our fingers crossed,” Vereshchuk said, “and we know that fearlessness, devotion and courage … will triumph.”

Windows blasted out, a car in flames, patients limping away to safety — this was the scene at a maternity hospital in Mariupol, a port city on the Sea of Azov, after a Russian strike tore through the facility, killing at least three people and injuring 17 on March 9, according to Mariupol officials.

The maternity hospital was one of many health care facilities hit amid Russia’s siege on key Ukrainian cities since the nation’s invasion in late February, a new Washington Post analysis reveals.

To confirm which hospitals have been damaged, The Post examined more than 500 videos and photos, reviewed social media posts from the hospitals, spoke to witnesses and hospital employees, and compared key details from these incidents to reports from Ukrainian officials, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, Human Rights Watch, the Center for Information Resilience and ACLED, a group that monitors armed conflict around the world.

The Post’s visual analysis verified nine incidents, including the strike in Mariupol, in which hospitals faced direct damage as a result of a reported Russian attack. There were fatalities in at least three of the incidents verified by The Post, according to officials. Three of the facilities specifically served women or children.

A steady stream of alarming images and accounts has emerged from the besieged city of Mariupol since it came under a Russian assault, which began last month. Before-and-after photos released Saturday show the widespread damage from above in a city where homes and apartments are smoldering and smashed.

Maxar Technologies, an American firm, collected the satellite imagery early Saturday, the end of a terrible week for the port city’s residents, who have been trapped there during increasingly brutal Russian attacks. On Wednesday, a strike tore through a maternity hospital, killing at least three people and injuring another 17, drawing international condemnation.

The bombardment continued in the days that followed, Ukrainian officials said, and Moscow’s forces have repeatedly denied humanitarian aid shipments into the city. Residents have been left stranded with little power, water and food.

In one pair of photos, a residential area is shown before the Russian invasion, a cluster of apartment buildings that surround a sports field, the lines of what may be a basketball court visible in the shot. In the picture taken Saturday, the buildings are burning and destroyed, a thick plume of smoke obscuring the field.

Another set of before-and-after photos shows more large apartment buildings clustered in a forested area. After days of shelling in the city, the apartments on Saturday appeared charred and severely damaged, with black smoke unfurling from several structures. Human Rights Watch has called the situation in the city a humanitarian catastrophe.

Ukraine’s intelligence service said Russian troops fired at civilians attempting to flee a village in the Kyiv region Saturday, killing seven people, including a child.

The civilians, all women and children, were trying to leave Peremoha — about 18 miles east of Kyiv — for the village of Gostroluchcha, said the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection of Ukraine. The agency said the number of people injured was unclear. The incident could not immediately be independently verified.

In a follow-up bulletin, the Ukrainian intelligence agency said the group of civilians was trying to evacuate without an agreed-upon “humanitarian corridor,” calling the attack a war crime and imploring people to use only the official evacuation routes.

Russian troops forced the group’s survivors to return to Peremoha, the agency said, and Ukrainian officials were finding it “almost impossible” to contact them and to provide medical and humanitarian aid.

The intelligence agency issued a reminder that the Geneva Conventions regulate the protection of civilians during war.

“Under these rules, deliberate attacks on civilians who are not directly involved in hostilities are tantamount to a war crime,” the Ukrainian agency said.

Russia has repeatedly denied targeting civilians, but a growing number of Western officials are raising questions about possible war crimes. Nearly a week ago, Russian forces fired mortar shells at another town on the outskirts of Kyiv, sending panicked residents running for their lives and killing at least eight people, including a family, according to a local government official.

Russian agents came to the home of Google’s top executive in Moscow to deliver a frightening ultimatum last September: take down an app that had drawn the ire of Russian President Vladimir Putin within 24 hours, or be taken to prison.

Google quickly moved the woman to a hotel where she checked in under an assumed name and might be protected by the presence of other guests and hotel security, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The same agents — believed by company officials to be from Russia’s FSB, a successor to the KGB intelligence service — then showed up at her room to tell her the clock was still ticking.

Within hours, an app designed to help Russians register protest votes against Putin could no longer be downloaded from Google or Apple, whose main representative in Moscow faced a similarly harrowing sequence. Titans of American technology had been brought to their knees by some of the most primitive intimidation tactics in the Kremlin playbook.

PHILADELPHIA — President Biden and his party have moved in recent days to reorient their election-year pitch to voters around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — seeking to shift blame for struggles to tame rising prices onto Russian President Vladimir Putin and promoting the White House strategy to punish the Kremlin as a muscular response to a geopolitical threat.

Democrats said they hope the message, which they honed in political meetings over the past week, will help address some of their biggest liabilities ahead of the November midterm elections. Chief among them are Biden’s low approval ratings and a widespread perception that Democrats are at fault for a sharp increase in inflation.

Now, Biden is repeatedly bringing up “Putin’s price hike” at the pump. White House officials have distributed talking points to allies urging them to echo this line. And Democrats are touting the economic sanctions Biden has leveled on Russia, contrasting them with former president Donald Trump’s praise for Putin.

A Russian general has been killed in battle in the hard-hit city of Mariupol, Ukrainian officials said Saturday. The officer was identified as Russian Maj. Gen. Andrei Kolesnikov, according to Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry.

Kolesnikov was not identified by name, though a Western official on Friday confirmed that three Russian generals have been killed in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion two weeks ago. The most recent general was a commander of the Eastern Military District.

Russian officials have shared few details on the number of casualties among its forces, including ranking officers.

Maj. Gen. Andrei Sukhovetsky, a top officer in the Russian army who commanded the Russian 7th Airborne Division, was killed in late February; his death was confirmed by his colleague and the officers’ association in southern Russia, according to the Associated Press. The death of another general, Maj. Gen. Vitaly Gerasimov outside Kharkiv, was reported by Ukrainian officials but not confirmed by any Russian sources.

Lt. Gen. Scott D. Berrier, director the Defense Intelligence Agency, on Tuesday estimated between 2,000 and 4,000 Russian soldiers had died since the start of the invasion. Despite their mismatch in military forces — Russia outpaces Ukraine in its number of soldiers, military spending and weaponry — Russia’s once-seemingly formidable military has suffered significant losses in fighters and in equipment with only modest gains to show for it.