It’s hell on Earth.
That’s how some Ukrainians are describing the situation as the invasion ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin enters its fourth bloody week.
Children sheltering in a theater and parents waiting in line for food became the latest civilian targets killed or wounded in Ukraine as Russian forces, which have been stalled on multiple fronts, aimed their missiles, guns, and bombs at heavily populated towns and cities.
Russian airstrikes have previously hit a maternity hospital, a church, and multiple crowded apartment buildings all over the war-torn country.
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In the besieged port city of Mariupol, the mayor’s office said a Russian rocket demolished a theater where hundreds of people were believed to be taking shelter. The building itself withstood the impact of the airstrike, but civilians remain trapped under rubble, the Associated Press reported, citing Ukraine’s ombudswoman Lyudmyla Denisova.
Just how many people died or were injured was unknown as Moscow forces continued to shell the already battered area.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky mentioned the Mariupol bombing in his daily early-morning address Thursday.
“Our hearts are broken by what Russia is doing to our people, to our Mariupol,” he said.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba called the attack on the theater a “horrendous war crime.”
The Russian Defense Ministry denied bombing any targets in Mariupol on Wednesday night, though satellite imagery from the Maxar space technology firm showed the word “CHILDREN” written in large white letters in Russian in front of and behind the building.
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Workers afraid for their own lives braved Russian shelling to dump the bodies of children into a mass grave, the Associated Press reported. So far, local officials believe 2,500 people in Mariupol have died, though they warned that number could be higher.
In Kharkiv, doctors have been struggling to treat COVID-19 patients as bombs rain down around them. In some cases, doctors have had to send coronavirus patients, hooked to ventilators and struggling to breathe, into bomb shelters.
“Bombing takes place from morning into night,” hospital director Dr. Pavel Nartov told the Associated Press. “It could hit at any time.”
A fire broke out in an apartment building in the capital city of Kyiv early Thursday after it was hit by the remnants of a downed Russian rocket, killing one person and injuring at least three others, according to emergency services.
In Irpin, a northwestern suburb that has been the site of fierce fighting for three weeks, residents were taken to a first-aid point on the road and transferred to buses, the New York Times reported. The evacuations in Irpin came after Ukrainian troops mounted a counterattack against Russian forces starting Tuesday night and ending Wednesday.
Marina Ovsyannikova, the Russian journalist who broke into live television coverage of the war holding up a handwritten “no war” sign, told the BBC she hoped other journalists would follow suit.
“To the Russians, I wanted to show you are zombified by this Kremlin propaganda. Stop believing it,” she told the BBC. “Stop listening to the Kremlin channels. Learn to look for information, analyze it. Western sources, Ukrainian sources, I understand it’s very hard in the conditions of an information war to find alternative information, but you need to try to look for it.”
Ovsyannikova, an editor at Russia’s state-controlled Channel One, was detained and questioned for 14 hours after her mid-broadcast interruption.
Russia’s bombardment of its democratic neighbor has already forced more than 3 million people to flee and has created an intense global backlash against Putin, who has shown no signs of backing down. He has continued to claim Ukraine is overrun by Nazis who want to invite NATO to his nation’s border.
As the fighting continues, six Western nations have called for a United Nations Security Council meeting Thursday. The United Kingdom’s Mission tweeted that “Russia is committing war crimes and targeting civilians. Russia’s illegal war on Ukraine is a threat to us all.”
The six countries that are pushing for a meeting are the United States, the U.K., France, Ireland, Norway, and Albania.
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The move comes one day after President Joe Biden called Putin a “war criminal” and promised $800 million in new aid to Kyiv.
After Zelensky delivered an 18-minute video speech to Congress on Wednesday, he told NBC’s Lester Holt that World War III “may have already started.”
Britain’s defense secretary announced his country would deploy a Sky Sabre missile defense system to Poland, as well as 100 people to help operate it, at the request of the Polish government. Poland shares a 332-mile border with Ukraine. Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said in a statement that troops would be deployed on a short-term basis as NATO forces remain on high alert.
