Russia-Ukraine live updates: Russian forces take strategic city as Kyiv, other areas face fierce bombardment

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.

Russian troops forced the group’s survivors to return to Peremoha, the intelligence service said. The agency said 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 President Vladimir Putin has championed the recruitment of about 16,000 alleged volunteer fighters from the Middle East, including Syrian mercenaries, as part of the invasion of Ukraine, British defense officials said Saturday.

The British Ministry of Defense said the news of influx of foreign fighters follows a report that Russia was “planning to deploy experienced mercenaries from Russian Private Military Companies to support the invasion.”

“President Putin has publicly welcomed the recruitment of ’16,000 mostly Middle Eastern volunteers’ to support his invasion of Ukraine,” the agency wrote in a statement posted to Twitter. “Syrian mercenaries have deployed alongside Russian proxy forces in Libya since late 2020.”

After Putin initially claimed that only professional troops were participating in the invasion, Russia’s Defense Ministry acknowledged this week that some conscript soldiers were fighting in the war. The British Ministry of Defense suggested this is a sign of how worn down the Russian troops are in the third week of the invasion.

“As losses mount, Russia will be forced to draw on alternative sources to reinforce their overstretched regular forces,” the agency wrote.

Despite risks and official warnings, U.S. veterans join Ukrainian war effort

ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine — As hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol have waited in desperation for an escape, Yulia Karaulan has been desperately trying to make it in.

Carrying nothing but a small blue leather handbag, the 38-year-old mother hauled herself into the last truck in a more than 30-vehicle humanitarian convoy heading into the city Saturday.

She couldn’t bear the feeling of helplessness, of being outside the besieged city as her husband, mother and 10-year-old daughter were at the mercy of Russian bombs and slowly running out of food.

“My life is my child, and I cannot get to her,” she said. “I feel so guilty that I’m not there.”

President Biden authorized the government to provide $200 million worth of U.S. military equipment and training to Ukraine, further boosting the total amount of aid the United States has given the country in its fight against Russia.

The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 allows the president to give U.S. military assets to another country without seeking extra approval from Congress. The $200 million comes on top of $350 million of assistance Biden already authorized in early March and $200 million in December, according to the White House.

More than 20 NATO nations have supplied Ukraine with weapons, before and since Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24, including antitank and antiaircraft missiles that have been used to destroy Russian vehicles and planes.

U.S. explores sending Ukraine more advanced weapons

The strategic city of Volnovakha “no longer exists” after Russians battered the city and captured it, a Ukrainian governor said Saturday.

Pavlo Kyrylenko, the Donetsk regional governor, appeared to confirm that Volnovakha had been overtaken by the Russians.

The city is strategically important as an inland gateway to the southern port city of Mariupol, making it advantageous for Russia as it endeavors to consolidate its position in the south.

The ongoing assault by Russian troops forced most of the city’s population to flee and decimated its infrastructure. “In general, Volnovakha with its infrastructure as such no longer exists,” Kyrylenko told Direct, a Ukrainian TV channel.

The governor also posted on Telegram that the city “no longer exists.”

“The majority of the population was evacuated, and the infrastructure was completely destroyed by the occupiers,” he wrote.

Kyrylenko said earlier Saturday that while Ukrainian forces have left Volnovakha, fighting is continuing on the city’s outskirts.

Russian President Vladimir Putin held a testy phone call with French counterpart Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz regarding the ongoing attack on Ukraine, an exchange that appears to have yielded little positive result or hope for de-escalation.

A French presidential official said after the call that the Russian leader showed no desire to stop the war, adding that the conversation was “very frank and difficult.” Macron and Scholz called for an immediate cease-fire.

The Kremlin-issued readout of the call points at a contentious discussion between the leaders regarding the humanitarian situation in eastern Ukraine, where Russian armed forces have besieged several cities.

Putin “informed the leaders about the real state of affairs,” the statement says, and accused Ukrainian forces of the “grossest violation of the norms of international humanitarian law,” including “placing heavy weapons in residential areas, near hospitals, schools, kindergartens, and the like.”

The humanitarian disaster has been mounting, with Ukrainian officials accusing Russia of striking a hospital in Mykolaiv and a mosque in Mariupol.

The international community also was stunned by images emerging from Mariupol, a southern port city in Ukraine, where officials said a Russian airstrike hit a maternity hospital, killing three people and injuring 17. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the attack an “atrocity” and “proof that the genocide of Ukrainians is taking place.”

Russia, in turn, transmitted a completely alternative version of events surrounding the strike through official statements and state media reports. Russian Foreign Ministry officials claimed without evidence that the hospital was a justified target because it had been “seized” by Ukrainian militia who had “kicked out” patients and doctors.

Putin doubled down on that narrative in the call Saturday, asking European politicians to “influence the Kyiv authorities to stop criminal acts.”

Large crowds gathered in the southern port of Melitopol on Saturday to protest the alleged abduction of the city’s mayor, Ivan Fedorov, by Russian troops; an act that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described as “a crime against democracy.”

Kirill Timoshenko, the deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office, posted a video to his Telegram account of what he said was a group of Russian troops taking Fedorov away on Friday through a town square, with what appears to be a hood over his head. Footage captured by closed-circuit television spread on social media Friday. Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, corroborated Timoshenko’s claim, saying Fedorov refused to cooperate with the Russian forces occupying the city and was carried out by 10 troops.

“During the abduction, they put a plastic bag over his head,” Gerashchenko told Interfax Ukraine. “The enemy detained him in the city crisis center, where he dealt with the life support of the Ukrainian city.”

Zelensky confirmed that Russian forces had captured Fedorov and demanded that Russia “release him from captivity immediately.”

“The detention of the mayor of Melitopol is a crime against democracy,” he said at a Saturday news conference in Kyiv, adding that Russia should be ashamed of its actions.

Few names summon up the same images of nuclear reactor ruin as Chernobyl.

The nuclear complex was home to four reactors when in 1986 an explosion badly damaged Unit No. 4, blowing off its concrete lid, spreading radiation into the air and leading to the evacuation of tens of thousands of residents across an “exclusion zone.”

The other three reactors continued to function; the last shut down in 2000. The radioactive fuel was removed from the reactor vessels and stored in another building at the site.

It wasn’t until 2016, in a feat of engineering, that the Unit 4 remains were covered with a massive structure weighing 36,000 tons.

But with war breaking out, Chernobyl has once again resurfaced in the headlines.