MUKACHEVO, Ukraine — Russian forces widened the scope of their attacks across Ukrainian cities Saturday while devastating civilians at the key southeastern port of Mariupol and taking an inland gateway that leads to the city.
Footage published by the Associated Press shows Russian tanks repeatedly firing on a large apartment block in Mariupol, the site of what Human Rights Watch has called a humanitarian catastrophe. Satellite images show several high-rises charred and destroyed. Kremlin troops have the city surrounded, and Ukrainian officials have accused them of striking a mosque there. A convoy carrying 90 tons of food and medicine to Mariupol stopped to spend the night in Berdyansk on Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address that night, and was scheduled to arrive Sunday. The southeastern port city has been without much food, water or electricity for days.
As Russia’s invasion entered its 17th day, President Biden authorized the United States to send $200 million worth of military equipment and training to Ukraine. Meanwhile, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov warned U.S. officials that Russia could target Ukrainian convoys carrying Western weapons, raising the stakes of American aid efforts.
Here’s what to know
- The governor of Ukraine’s Donetsk region, Pavlo Kyrylenko, confirmed Saturday that Ukrainian soldiers had pulled out of Volnovakha, which is strategically important as an inland gateway to Mariupol. He wrote on Telegram that Volnovakha “no longer exists” after most residents were evacuated and infrastructure was destroyed.
- About 1,300 Ukrainian troops have been killed by Russian forces since the start of the invasion last month, Zelensky said. He told reporters Saturday that between 500 and 600 Russian troops surrendered Friday.
- Protesters gathered in Melitopol, a southern port city, in opposition to the alleged abduction of the city’s mayor by Russian forces. Russia has accused the mayor, Ivan Fedorov, of “terrorist activities,” according to the Associated Press.
UNDERSTANDING THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE CONFLICT
Video from besieged Mariupol shows physical and emotional devastation: ‘I don’t know where to run’
In Mariupol, Ukraine, Russian tanks take aim at apartment buildings. Blocks of high-rises are smoldering. Fields are pockmarked from artillery rounds. Doctors dodge sniper fire. The dead are buried in mass graves.
These are among the terrifying scenes and snapshots that have emerged in recent days from the city on Ukraine’s southeastern coast, an important port coveted by Moscow, which hopes to seize control and use it as a launchpad for troops and supplies. The Kremlin’s forces have surrounded the city for at least 10 days, cutting off from sources of water, electricity and heat, with temperatures plummeting and food running low. Attempts to evacuate have been stalled for days.
On Saturday, after Russian troops captured Mariupol’s eastern outskirts, additional footage and photographs surfaced, shedding more light on the scope of the devastation there — a city under siege and suffering. Video from an Associated Press journalist still in the city shows Russian tanks repeatedly firing on a nine-story apartment complex. The shells collide with the building and ignite fires inside.
The AP reporter was shadowing a group of medical workers who came under fire while treating the injured, the news service said.
In the corridors of a hospital, Anastasia Erashova held a sleeping child and wept. She and her family were sheltering at her brother’s home when it was shelled, she told the AP, and two children were killed. She had blood on her head and a cut on her hand.
“I don’t know where to run to,” Erashova cried. “Who will bring back our children, who?”
Here’s the status of Ukrainian cities experiencing heavy Russian assault
More than two weeks into Russia’s assault on Ukraine, evidence suggests the invasion has not played out as planned. Still, Russian forces continue to press forward into several major cities across the nation of about 44 million people.
Here’s the status of several Ukrainian cities:
- Kyiv: A convoy of Russian military vehicles was still about nine to twelve miles from central Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, and making limited progress because of Ukrainian resistance and mechanical issues, said a senior NATO official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss security matters. Russian forces are still trying to surround and seize the capital, in what looks like it will be a drawn-out battle, although they have been making “limited but notable” gains in northwest suburbs, the official added.
- Mykolaiv: Russians continue to bombard this port city on the southern coast, near the Black Sea. Ukrainian officials accused Moscow of hitting a civilian cancer hospital there. The facility’s head doctor, Maksim Beznosenko, said many patients were present at the time of the attack but no one was killed.
- Volnovakha: The governor of the Donetsk region appeared to confirm Saturday that Russian forces have captured the town of Volnovakha, which is strategically important as a gateway to the port city of Mariupol about 40 miles south.
- Mariupol: The Ukrainian Defense Ministry said Saturday that Russian forces were advancing on Mariupol after a week-long siege. In a video message late Saturday, President Volodymyr Zelensky said that a convoy carrying 90 tons of food and medicine to the port city would arrive Sunday afternoon. Many residents here are trapped behind Russian front lines without power or water, and food is running low.
- Melitopol: Crowds in this southern port city gathered Saturday to protest Russian forces allegedly kidnapping Melitopol’s mayor, Ivan Fedorov. The deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office shared a video on Telegram of what he claimed were Russian troops abducting Fedorov on Thursday.
- Kharkiv, Chernihiv and Sumy: Russian troops have encircled and are shelling Kharkiv and Sumy in eastern Ukraine and Chernihiv in the country’s west, the British Ministry of Defense said Saturday.
Photos: In Ukraine’s Irpin, death, destruction and a tide of people seeking safety
IRPIN, Ukraine — For days, I have witnessed the scenes of nightmares: frightened people fleeing in snow flurries, the elderly carted in wheelbarrows, desperate children clinging to stuffed toys, frightened families cuddling their pets. And on Thursday, bodies of the dead from both sides of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.
Every journalist I have met, even those with decades of experience covering war, is shocked by what they are witnessing and fearful of what is ahead.
Video captures moment munitions strike apartment complex in Mykolaiv
Security camera footage, the authenticity of which was verified by The Washington Post, captured the moment Saturday morning when explosions struck an apartment complex just north of the city center in Mykolaiv, Ukraine. The blasts hit courtyards, parking spaces and a playground, and in one video, a man looks up before fleeing the area as munitions fall.
The explosions began just south of the apartment complex before striking it directly. At least eight explosions are shown in quick succession, with many more flashes of light caught in each camera’s periphery.
Mykolaiv, a port city on the Black Sea, has been the target of heavy Russian bombardment recently, much of it striking civilian areas. Earlier Saturday, Ukrainian officials accused Moscow of hitting a cancer hospital there.
‘My son’s life depends on this’: A desperate search for insulin in Kyiv as medicines disappear
KYIV, Ukraine — The temperature was below freezing, and the pharmacy line was way out the door. But Tetyana Dagadaeva could not be deterred.
For days, she and her 11-year-old son, Oleksiy, had been urgently searching for the insulin he needs to survive. With his supply at home dwindling, they soon would have no choice but to flee the country to keep him alive.
After two hours in the biting wind, the wooden door swung open and a woman in a lab coat shouted out the message Dagadaeva had prayed she wouldn’t hear again: They were out of stock.
“My son’s life depends on this,” she said somberly as she stepped away from the line. Her tears welled up.
As war rages across Ukraine, it is disrupting the flow of crucial drugs and medical supplies. When curfews are lifted each morning, residents of cities nationwide rush to queue at pharmacies in hopes they’ll find what they need.
In an online English conversation class, Ukrainian teachers share disturbing tales
John Tytla had no idea where world events would turn in January when he joined a Zoom conversation class to help teachers from Ukrainian villages gain greater fluency in English.
Tytla, a military retiree living in Kansas, is of Ukrainian ancestry and signed up to participate after his wife ran into the organizer, Inna Golovakha of the Arlington, Va.-based nonprofit Ukrainian Cultural Initiatives, on a visit to Washington.
The early chats revolved around their homes, food, music and travel — simple pleasures that are still the focus of the conversations three weeks after Russia’s invasion, but for different reasons.
On Saturday, the teachers from across Ukraine gathered online to share difficult stories with Tytla and other American volunteers: about friends whose homes in the suburbs of Kyiv have no electricity to power their heat or pump water; about food cooked for soldiers or shared with refugees who have fled to rural areas; about days and nights punctuated by the sound of sirens; and about the desperate flight many have embarked on, sometimes to safety and other times to worse conditions.
“It is better to stay at home under the bombs,” said Tetiana Ivaniuk, describing people taking buses from their homes to desolate conditions.
Myroslava Nazaruk, who lives about 25 miles from the border with Belarus, said many people in her village have relatives in Belarus who don’t believe their stories of bombings. “They say it is fake,” Nazaruk said. Her local school is now a makeshift barracks for resistance fighters. Some children have left the country; others now meet online.
“We are all now afraid,” said Iryna Svyntsytskaya, even as she spoke with pride of the resistance effort. “We are going to help each other.”
So much changed over three weeks, Tytla said, recalling how carefree the teachers used to be. “They were pretty oblivious to the war ever really happening,” he said. “They didn’t really bring it up.”
Map: Russia’s latest advancements in Ukraine
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 got through most humanitarian corridors, Ukrainian deputy prime minister says
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.”
Russian attacks hit at least 9 Ukrainian medical facilities, visual evidence shows
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.
Satellite images from before and after Russian attacks show scope of devastation in Mariupol
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.
Russian forces kill 7 women and children evacuating the Kyiv region, Ukraine says
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.
Putin’s pre-war moves against U.S. tech giants laid groundwork for crackdown on free expression
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.
Biden, Democrats infuse Ukraine crisis into a revamped election-year pitch to voters
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.
Russian general killed in besieged Mariupol, Ukrainian officials say
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.
MUKACHEVO, Ukraine — Russian forces widened the scope of their attacks across Ukrainian cities Saturday while devastating civilians at the key southeastern port of Mariupol and taking an inland gateway that leads to the city.Footage published by the Associated Press shows Russian tanks repeatedly firing on a large apartment block in Mariupol, the site of what Human Rights Watch has called a humanitarian catastrophe. Satellite images show several high-rises charred and destroyed. Kremlin troops have the city surrounded, and Ukrainian officials have accused them of striking a mosque there. A convoy carrying 90 tons of food and medicine to Mariupol stopped to spend the night in Berdyansk on Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address that night, and was scheduled to arrive Sunday. The southeastern port city has been without much food, water or electricity for days.As Russia’s invasion entered its 17th day, President Biden authorized the United States to send $200 million worth of military equipment and training to Ukraine. Meanwhile, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov warned U.S. officials that Russia could target Ukrainian convoys carrying Western weapons, raising the stakes of American aid efforts.Here’s what to knowThe governor of Ukraine’s Donetsk region, Pavlo Kyrylenko, confirmed Saturday that Ukrainian soldiers had pulled out of Volnovakha, which is strategically important as an inland gateway to Mariupol. He wrote on Telegram that Volnovakha “no longer exists” after most residents were evacuated and infrastructure was destroyed.About 1,300 Ukrainian troops have been killed by Russian forces since the start of the invasion last month, Zelensky said. He told reporters Saturday that between 500 and 600 Russian troops surrendered Friday.Protesters gathered in Melitopol, a southern port city, in opposition to the alleged abduction of the city’s mayor by Russian forces. Russia has accused the mayor, Ivan Fedorov, of “terrorist activities,” according to the Associated Press.UNDERSTANDING THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE CONFLICTVideo from besieged Mariupol shows physical and emotional devastation: ‘I don’t know where to run’Return to menuIn Mariupol, Ukraine, Russian tanks take aim at apartment buildings. Blocks of high-rises are smoldering. Fields are pockmarked from artillery rounds. Doctors dodge sniper fire. The dead are buried in mass graves.These are among the terrifying scenes and snapshots that have emerged in recent days from the city on Ukraine’s southeastern coast, an important port coveted by Moscow, which hopes to seize control and use it as a launchpad for troops and supplies. The Kremlin’s forces have surrounded the city for at least 10 days, cutting off from sources of water, electricity and heat, with temperatures plummeting and food running low. Attempts to evacuate have been stalled for days.On Saturday, after Russian troops captured Mariupol’s eastern outskirts, additional footage and photographs surfaced, shedding more light on the scope of the devastation there — a city under siege and suffering. Video from an Associated Press journalist still in the city shows Russian tanks repeatedly firing on a nine-story apartment complex. The shells collide with the building and ignite fires inside.Russian forces surrounding Mariupol continued their siege on March 12 while people sought shelter in crowded hospital halls. (AP)The AP reporter was shadowing a group of medical workers who came under fire while treating the injured, the news service said.In the corridors of a hospital, Anastasia Erashova held a sleeping child and wept. She and her family were sheltering at her brother’s home when it was shelled, she told the AP, and two children were killed. She had blood on her head and a cut on her hand.“I don’t know where to run to,” Erashova cried. “Who will bring back our children, who?”Updates continue below advertisementHere’s the status of Ukrainian cities experiencing heavy Russian assaultReturn to menuMore than two weeks into Russia’s assault on Ukraine, evidence suggests the invasion has not played out as planned. Still, Russian forces continue to press forward into several major cities across the nation of about 44 million people.Here’s the status of several Ukrainian cities:Kyiv: A convoy of Russian military vehicles was still about nine to twelve miles from central Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, and making limited progress because of Ukrainian resistance and mechanical issues, said a senior NATO official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss security matters. Russian forces are still trying to surround and seize the capital, in what looks like it will be a drawn-out battle, although they have been making “limited but notable” gains in northwest suburbs, the official added.Mykolaiv: Russians continue to bombard this port city on the southern coast, near the Black Sea. Ukrainian officials accused Moscow of hitting a civilian cancer hospital there. The facility’s head doctor, Maksim Beznosenko, said many patients were present at the time of the attack but no one was killed.Volnovakha: The governor of the Donetsk region appeared to confirm Saturday that Russian forces have captured the town of Volnovakha, which is strategically important as a gateway to the port city of Mariupol about 40 miles south.Mariupol: The Ukrainian Defense Ministry said Saturday that Russian forces were advancing on Mariupol after a week-long siege. In a video message late Saturday, President Volodymyr Zelensky said that a convoy carrying 90 tons of food and medicine to the port city would arrive Sunday afternoon. Many residents here are trapped behind Russian front lines without power or water, and food is running low.Melitopol: Crowds in this southern port city gathered Saturday to protest Russian forces allegedly kidnapping Melitopol’s mayor, Ivan Fedorov. The deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office shared a video on Telegram of what he claimed were Russian troops abducting Fedorov on Thursday.Kharkiv, Chernihiv and Sumy: Russian troops have encircled and are shelling Kharkiv and Sumy in eastern Ukraine and Chernihiv in the country’s west, the British Ministry of Defense said Saturday.Updates continue below advertisementPhotos: In Ukraine’s Irpin, death, destruction and a tide of people seeking safetyReturn to menuIRPIN, Ukraine — For days, I have witnessed the scenes of nightmares: frightened people fleeing in snow flurries, the elderly carted in wheelbarrows, desperate children clinging to stuffed toys, frightened families cuddling their pets. And on Thursday, bodies of the dead from both sides of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.Every journalist I have met, even those with decades of experience covering war, is shocked by what they are witnessing and fearful of what is ahead.Updates continue below advertisementVideo captures moment munitions strike apartment complex in MykolaivReturn to menuThree synchronized videos reveal the moment several strikes bombard a residential complex in the Ukranian city of Mykolaiv on March 12. (The Washington Post)Security camera footage, the authenticity of which was verified by The Washington Post, captured the moment Saturday morning when explosions struck an apartment complex just north of the city center in Mykolaiv, Ukraine. The blasts hit courtyards, parking spaces and a playground, and in one video, a man looks up before fleeing the area as munitions fall.The explosions began just south of the apartment complex before striking it directly. At least eight explosions are shown in quick succession, with many more flashes of light caught in each camera’s periphery.Mykolaiv, a port city on the Black Sea, has been the target of heavy Russian bombardment recently, much of it striking civilian areas. Earlier Saturday, Ukrainian officials accused Moscow of hitting a cancer hospital there.Updates continue below advertisement‘My son’s life depends on this’: A desperate search for insulin in Kyiv as medicines disappearReturn to menuKYIV, Ukraine — The temperature was below freezing, and the pharmacy line was way out the door. But Tetyana Dagadaeva could not be deterred.For days, she and her 11-year-old son, Oleksiy, had been urgently searching for the insulin he needs to survive. With his supply at home dwindling, they soon would have no choice but to flee the country to keep him alive.After two hours in the biting wind, the wooden door swung open and a woman in a lab coat shouted out the message Dagadaeva had prayed she wouldn’t hear again: They were out of stock.“My son’s life depends on this,” she said somberly as she stepped away from the line. Her tears welled up.As war rages across Ukraine, it is disrupting the flow of crucial drugs and medical supplies. When curfews are lifted each morning, residents of cities nationwide rush to queue at pharmacies in hopes they’ll find what they need.Updates continue below advertisementIn an online English conversation class, Ukrainian teachers share disturbing talesReturn to menuJohn Tytla had no idea where world events would turn in January when he joined a Zoom conversation class to help teachers from Ukrainian villages gain greater fluency in English.Tytla, a military retiree living in Kansas, is of Ukrainian ancestry and signed up to participate after his wife ran into the organizer, Inna Golovakha of the Arlington, Va.-based nonprofit Ukrainian Cultural Initiatives, on a visit to Washington.The early chats revolved around their homes, food, music and travel — simple pleasures that are still the focus of the conversations three weeks after Russia’s invasion, but for different reasons.On Saturday, the teachers from across Ukraine gathered online to share difficult stories with Tytla and other American volunteers: about friends whose homes in the suburbs of Kyiv have no electricity to power their heat or pump water; about food cooked for soldiers or shared with refugees who have fled to rural areas; about days and nights punctuated by the sound of sirens; and about the desperate flight many have embarked on, sometimes to safety and other times to worse conditions.“It is better to stay at home under the bombs,” said Tetiana Ivaniuk, describing people taking buses from their homes to desolate conditions.Myroslava Nazaruk, who lives about 25 miles from the border with Belarus, said many people in her village have relatives in Belarus who don’t believe their stories of bombings. “They say it is fake,” Nazaruk said. Her local school is now a makeshift barracks for resistance fighters. Some children have left the country; others now meet online.“We are all now afraid,” said Iryna Svyntsytskaya, even as she spoke with pride of the resistance effort. “We are going to help each other.”So much changed over three weeks, Tytla said, recalling how carefree the teachers used to be. “They were pretty oblivious to the war ever really happening,” he said. “They didn’t really bring it up.”Updates continue below advertisementMap: Russia’s latest advancements in UkraineReturn to menuRussian troops advanced around Chernihiv and toward eastern Kyiv; they also moved northeast from Kherson in the south. Shelling in Mariupol and Kharkiv continued.Updates continue below advertisementCivilians got through most humanitarian corridors, Ukrainian deputy prime minister saysReturn to menuCivilians 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.”Updates continue below advertisementRussian attacks hit at least 9 Ukrainian medical facilities, visual evidence shows Return to menuVideo verified by The Washington Post shows damage to a maternity hospital in Mariupol on March 9. (Telegram)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.Satellite images from before and after Russian attacks show scope of devastation in MariupolReturn to menuA 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.Russian forces kill 7 women and children evacuating the Kyiv region, Ukraine saysReturn to menuUkraine’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.Putin’s pre-war moves against U.S. tech giants laid groundwork for crackdown on free expressionReturn to menuRussian 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.Biden, Democrats infuse Ukraine crisis into a revamped election-year pitch to voters Return to menuPHILADELPHIA — 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.Russian general killed in besieged Mariupol, Ukrainian officials sayReturn to menuA 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.