europe
In France, it's Macron vs. Le Pen, again, for presidency
Incumbent Emmanuel Macron will face far-right nationalist Marine Le Pen in a winner-takes-all runoff for the French presidency, after they both advanced Sunday in the first round of voting in the country’s election to set up another head-to-head clash of their sharply opposing visions for France.
But while Macron won t heir last contest in 2017 by a landslide to become France's youngest-ever president, the same outcome this time is far from guaranteed. Macron, now 44, emerged ahead from Sunday's first round, but the runoff is essentially a new election and the next two weeks of campaigning to the April 24 second-round vote promise to be bruising and confrontational against his 53-year-old political nemesis.
Savvier and more polished as she makes her third attempt to become France's first woman president, Le Pen was handsomely rewarded Sunday at the ballot box for her years-long effort to rebrand herself as more pragmatic and less extreme. Macron has accused Le Pen of pushing an extremist manifesto of racist, ruinous policies. Le Pen wants to roll back some rights for Muslims, banning them from wearing headscarves in public, and to drastically reduce immigration from outside Europe.
Also read: France pushing for energy sanctions against Russia
On Sunday, she racked up her best-ever first-round tally of votes. With most votes counted, Macron had just over 27% and Le Pen had just under 24%. Hard-left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon was third, missing out on the two-candidate runoff, with close to 22%.
Macron also improved on his first-round showing in 2017, despite his presidency being rocked by an almost unrelenting series of both domestic and international crises. They include Russia's war in Ukraine that overshadowed the election and diverted his focus from the campaign.
With polling suggesting that the runoff against Le Pen could be close, Macron immediately started throwing his energies into the battle.
Addressing supporters Sunday night who chanted “five more years,” Macron warned that “nothing is done” and said the runoff campaign will be “decisive for our country and for Europe.”
Claiming that Le Pen would align France with “populists and xenophobes,” he said: “That's not us.”
“I want to reach out to all those who want to work for France," he said. He vowed to “implement the project of progress, of French and European openness and independence we have advocated for.”
The election outcome will have wide international influence as Europe struggles to contain the havoc wreaked by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Macron has strongly backed European Union sanctions on Russia while Le Pen has worried about their impact on French living standards. Macron also is a firm supporter of NATO and of close collaboration among the European Union’s 27 members.
Macron for months had looked like a shoo-in to become France’s first president in 20 years to win a second term. But National Rally leader Le Pen, in a late surge, tapped into the foremost issue on many French voters’ minds: soaring costs for food, gas and heating due to rising inflation and the repercussions of Western sanctions on Russia.
To win in round two, both Macron and Le Pen now need to reach out to voters who backed the 10 presidential candidates defeated Sunday.
For some of the losers' disappointed supporters, the runoff vote promises to be agonizing. Melenchon voter Jennings Tangly, a 21-year-old student of English at Paris' Sorbonne University, said the second-round match-up was an awful prospect for her, a choice “between the plague and cholera.”
She described Macron's presidency as “abject,” but said she would vote for him in round two simply to keep Le Pen from the presidential Elysee Palace.
“It would be a survival vote rather than a vote with my heart,” she said.
Le Pen's supporters celebrated with champagne and chanted “We’re going to win!” She sought to reach out to left-wing supporters for round two by promising fixes for “a France torn apart.”
She said the second round presents voters with “a fundamental choice between two opposing visions of the future: Either the division, injustice and disorder imposed by Emmanuel Macron to the benefit of the few, or the uniting of French people around social justice and protection.”
Also read: Macron keeps an open line to Putin as war in Ukraine rages
Some of her defeated rivals were so alarmed by the possibility of Le Pen beating Macron that they urged their supporters Sunday to shift their second-round votes to the incumbent. Melenchon, addressing supporters who sometimes shed tears, repeatedly said: “We must not give one vote to Mrs. Le Pen.”
Describing herself as “profoundly worried,” defeated conservative candidate Valerie Pecresse warned of “the chaos that would ensue” if Le Pen was elected, saying the far-right leader has never been so close to power. Pecresse said she would vote for Macron in the runoff.
To beat Le Pen, Macron will aim to pick apart her attempted rebranding as a less dangerous political force, a makeover that has even highlighted her love of cats.
Her softer image has won over some voters but made others even more suspicious.
Yves Maillot, a retired engineer, said he voted for Macron only to counterbalance Le Pen. He said he fears that her long-standing hostility to the EU could see her try to take France out of the bloc, even though she has dropped that from her manifesto.
“I don't think she's changed at all,” he said. “It's the same thing, but with cats."
Ukrainian defenders dig in as Russia boosts firepower
As Ukrainian forces dug in on Sunday, Russia lined up more firepower and tapped a decorated general to take centralized control of the war ahead of a potentially decisive showdown in eastern Ukraine that could start within days.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned Sunday in his nightly address to the nation that the coming week would be as crucial as any in the war, saying “Russian troops will move to even larger operations in the east of our state.”
He also accused Russia of trying to evade responsibility for war crimes in Ukraine.
“When people lack the courage to admit their mistakes, apologize, adapt to reality and learn, they turn into monsters. And when the world ignores it, the monsters decide that it is the world that has to adapt to them,” Zelenskyy said.
“The day will come when they will have to admit everything. Accept the truth,” he added.
Also read:Russia hits Ukraine from the air and sea
Experts have said that the next phase of the battle may begin with a full-scale offensive. The outcome could determine the course of the conflict, which has flattened cities, killed untold thousands and isolated Moscow economically and politically.
In an interview that appeared on “60 Minutes” Sunday night, Zelenskyy said Ukraine’s fate as the war shifts to the south and east depends on whether the United States will help match an expected surge in Russian weaponry in those regions.
“To be honest, whether we will be able to (survive) depends on this,” said Zelenskyy, speaking through a translator. “I have 100% confidence in our people and in our armed forces. But unfortunately, I don’t have the confidence that we will be receiving everything we need.”
Zelenskyy thanked President Joe Biden for U.S. military aide to date but added that he “long ago” forwarded a list of specific items Ukraine desperately needed and that history would judge Biden’s response.
“He has the list,” Zelenskyy said. “President Biden can enter history as the person who stood shoulder to shoulder with the Ukrainian people who won and chose the right to have their own country. (This) also depends on him.”
Questions remain about the ability of Russia's depleted and demoralized forces to conquer much ground after their advance on the capital, Kyiv, was repelled by determined Ukrainian defenders. Britain’s Defense Ministry reported Sunday that the Russian forces were trying to compensate for mounting casualties by recalling veterans discharged in the past decade.
In Washington, a senior U.S. official said that Russia has appointed Gen. Alexander Dvornikov, one of its most seasoned military chiefs, to oversee the invasion. The official was not authorized to be identified and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Until now, Russia has had no central war commander on the ground.
The new battlefield leadership comes as the Russian military prepares for what is expected to be a large, focused push to expand control in Ukraine's east. Russia-backed separatists have fought Ukrainian forces in the eastern Donbas region since 2014 and declared some territory there as independent.
Dvornikov, 60, gained prominence as head of the Russian forces deployed to Syria in 2015 to shore up President Bashar Assad’s government during the country's devastating civil war. U.S. officials say he has a record of brutality against civilians in Syria and other war theaters.
Russian authorities do not generally confirm such appointments and have said nothing about a new role for Dvornikov, who received the Hero of Russia medal, one of the country’s highest awards, from President Vladimir Putin in 2016.
U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan, speaking Sunday on CNN's “State of the Union," played down the significance of the appointment.
“What we have learned in the first several weeks of this war is that Ukraine will never be subjected to Russia,” Sullivan said. “It doesn’t matter which general President Putin tries to appoint.”
Western military analysts say Russia's assault has increasingly focused on a sickle-shaped arc of eastern Ukraine — from Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, in the north to Kherson in the south.
The narrower effort could help Russia's problem, earlier in the war, of spreading its offensive too widely over too great a geographic area.
“Just looking at it on a map, you can see that they will be able to bring to bear a lot more power in a lot more concentrated fashion,” by focusing mainly on eastern Ukraine, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Friday.
Newly released Maxar Technologies satellite imagery showed an 8-mile (13-kilometer) convoy of military vehicles headed south through Ukraine to Donbas, recalling images of a convoy that got stalled on roads to Kyiv for weeks before Russia gave up on trying to take the capital.
On Sunday, Russian forces shelled government-controlled Kharkiv and sent reinforcements toward Izyum to the southeast in a bid to break Ukraine's defenses, the Ukrainian military command said. The Russians also kept up their siege of Mariupol, a key southern port that has been under attack and surrounded for nearly 1 ½ months.
A Russian Defense Ministry spokesman, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, said Russia's military used air-launched missiles to hit Ukraine’s S-300 air-defense missile systems in the southern Mykolaiv region and at an air base in Chuhuiv, a city not far from Kharkiv.
Sea-launched Russian cruise missiles destroyed the headquarters of a Ukrainian military unit stationed farther west in the Dnipro region, Konashenkov said. Neither the Ukrainian nor the Russian military claims could be independently verified.
Also read:Zelenskyy: Russian aggression not limited to Ukraine alone
The airport in Dnipro, Ukraine’s fourth-largest city, was also hit by missiles twice on Sunday, according to the regional governor.
On Sunday night, Zelenskyy again called on Western countries to provide more assistance to Ukraine. During talks with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Zelenskyy said, he discussed “how to strengthen sanctions against Russia and ... force Russia to seek peace.”
“I am glad to note that the German position has recently changed in favor of Ukraine. I consider it absolutely logical,” Zelenskyy said.
The president of the European Commission said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday that Ukraine's response to a questionnaire she recently handed to Zelenskyy will enable her to decide whether to recommend the nation as a candidate to join the EU.
The process normally takes years, but Ursula von der Leyen has said Ukraine’s application could take just weeks to consider.
“Yesterday, somebody told me: ‘You know, when our soldiers are dying, I want them to know that their children will be free and be part of the European Union,'” von der Leyen said.
Ukrainian authorities have accused Russian forces of committing war crimes against civilians, including airstrikes on hospitals, a missile attack that killed at least 57 people at a train station and other violence discovered as Russian soldiers withdrew from the outskirts of Kyiv.
A day after meeting with Zelenskyy in Kyiv, Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer announced that he will meet Monday in Moscow with Putin. Austria, a member of the European Union, is militarily neutral and not a member of NATO.
Ukraine has blamed Russia for killing civilians in Bucha and other towns outside the capital where hundreds of bodies, many with their hands bound and signs of torture, were found after Russian troops retreated. Russia has denied the allegations and falsely claimed that the scenes in Bucha were staged.
Maria Vaselenko, 77, a resident of Borodyanka, said her daughter and son-in-law were killed, leaving her grandchildren orphaned.
“The Russians were shooting. And some people wanted to come and help, but they were shooting them. They were putting explosives under dead people," Vaselenko said. “That’s why my children have been under the rubble for 36 days. It was not allowed” to remove bodies.
In Mariupol, Russia was deploying Chechen fighters, reputed to be particularly fierce. Capturing the city on the Sea of Azov would give Russia a land bridge to the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia seized from Ukraine eight years ago.
Residents have lacked food, water and electricity since Russian forces surrounded the city and frustrated evacuation missions. Ukrainian authorities think an airstrike on a theater that was being used as a bomb shelter killed hundreds of civilians, and Zelenskyy has said he expects more evidence of atrocities to be found once Mariupol no longer is blockaded.
The Institute for the Study of War, an American think tank, predicted that Russian forces will “renew offensive operations in the coming days” from Izyum, a town southeast of Kharkiv, in the campaign to conquer the Donbas, which comprises Ukraine's industrial heartland.
But in the view of the think tank's analysts, “The outcome of forthcoming Russian operations in eastern Ukraine remains very much in question.”
Russia hits Ukraine from the air and sea
The governor of the region that includes Ukraine's fourth-largest city, Dnipro, says the airport was hit twice by missile attacks on Sunday. The Ukrainian military command said Russian forces also keep shelling Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, and have kept up their siege of Mariupol, the key southern port city that has been under attack for nearly six weeks.
Also read: Zelenskyy: Russian aggression not limited to Ukraine alone
The Russian Defense Ministry says it’s air-launched missiles hit Ukraine’s S-300 air defense missile systems in two locations, while sea-launched cruise missiles destroyed a Ukrainian unit's headquarters in the Dnipro region. Neither side's military claims could be independently verified.
The Pentagon said Russia has a clear advantage in armored forces for its next phase in its war on Ukraine. Press secretary John Kirby said Friday that the Russians spread themselves too thin to take the capital, but now they're more focused on a smaller region, and still have the vast majority of their combat power. A major effort by Ukrainian defenses and more Western assistance will be needed to push them back.
Also read: Russian shelling traps residents of Mariupol
Zelenskyy: Russian aggression not limited to Ukraine alone
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Russia is targeting all of Europe with its aggression, and that stopping the invasion of Ukraine is essential for the security of all democracies.
In his late night address to Ukrainians on Saturday, Zelenskyy said that Russian aggression "was not intended to be limited to Ukraine alone” and the “entire European project is a target for Russia.”
“That is why it is not just the moral duty of all democracies, all the forces of Europe, to support Ukraine’s desire for peace," he said. ”This is, in fact, a strategy of defense for every civilized state."
His address came as civilians continued to flee eastern parts of the country before an expected onslaught and firefighters searched for survivors in a northern town no longer occupied by Russian forces.
Several European leaders have made efforts to show solidarity with the battle-scarred nation. Zelenskyy thanked the leaders of Britain and Austria for their visits Saturday to Kyiv, Ukraine's capital, and pledges of further support.
He also thanked the European Commission president and Canada's prime minister for a global fundraising event that brought in more than 10 billion euros ($11 billion) for Ukrainians who have fled their homes.
Zelenskyy repeated his call for a complete embargo on Russian oil and gas, which he called the sources of Russia’s “self-confidence and impunity.”
“Freedom does not have time to wait,” Zelenskyy said. "When tyranny begins its aggression against everything that keeps the peace in Europe, action must be taken immediately."
More than six weeks after the invasion began, Russia has pulled its troops from the northern part of the country, around Kyiv, and refocused on the Donbas region in the east. Western military analysts said an arc of territory in eastern Ukraine was under Russian control, from Kharkiv — Ukraine’s second-largest city — in the north to Kherson in the south.
But counterattacks are threatening Russian control of Kherson, according to the Western assessments, and Ukrainian forces are repelling Russian assaults elsewhere in the Donbas, a largely Russian-speaking and industrial region.
Civilians were evacuating eastern Ukraine following a missile strike Friday that killed at least 52 people and wounded more than 100 at a train station where thousands clamored to leave.
Ukrainian authorities have called on civilians to get out ahead of an imminent, stepped-up offensive by Russian forces in the east. With trains not running out of Kramatorsk on Saturday, panicked residents boarded buses or looked for other ways to leave, fearing the kind of unrelenting assaults and occupations by Russian invaders that brought food shortages, demolished buildings and death to other cities.
“It was terrifying. The horror, the horror,” one resident told British broadcaster Sky, recalling Friday’s attack on the train station. “Heaven forbid, to live through this again. No, I don’t want to.”
Ukraine’s state railway company said residents of Kramatorsk and other parts of the Donbas could flee through other train stations. Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said 10 evacuation corridors were planned for Saturday.
Zelenskyy called the train station attack the latest example of war crimes by Russian forces and said it should motivate the West to do more to help his country defend itself.
Russia denied responsibility and accused Ukraine’s military of firing on the station to turn blame for civilian casualties on Moscow. A Russian Defense Ministry spokesman detailed the missile’s trajectory and Ukrainian troop positions to bolster the argument.
Major Gen. Igor Konashenkov alleged Ukraine’s security services were preparing a “cynical staged” media operation in Irpin, another town near Kyiv, intended to attribute civilian casualties to Russian forces — falsely, he said — and to stage the slaying of a fake Russian intelligence team that intended to kill witnesses. The claims could not be independently verified.
Western experts and Ukrainian authorities insisted that Russia attacked the station. Remnants of the rocket had the words “For the children” in Russian painted on it. The phrasing seemed to suggest the missile was sent to avenge the loss or subjugation of children, although its exact meaning remained unclear.
Ukrainian authorities have worked to identify victims and document possible war crimes in the north. The mayor of Bucha, a town near Kyiv where graphic evidence of civilian slayings emerged after Russian forces withdrew, said search teams were still finding bodies of people shot at close range in yards, parks and city squares.
READ: Ukraine war: Does UN really matter?
Workers unearthed 67 corpses Friday from a mass grave near a church, according to Ukraine's prosecutor general. Russia has falsely claimed that the scenes in Bucha were staged.
Ukrainian and Western officials have repeatedly accused Russian forces of committing atrocities. A total of 176 children have been killed, while 324 more have been wounded, the Prosecutor General’s Office said Saturday.
In an interview with The Associated Press inside his heavily guarded presidential office complex, Zelenskyy said he is committed to negotiating a diplomatic end to the war even though Russia has “tortured” Ukraine. He also acknowledged that peace likely will not come quickly. Talks so far have not included Russian President Vladimir Putin or other top officials.
“We have to fight, but fight for life. You can’t fight for dust when there is nothing and no people. That’s why it is important to stop this war,” he said.
Ukrainian authorities have said they expect to find more mass killings once they reach the southern port city of Mariupol, which is also in the Donbas and has been subjected to a monthlong blockade and intense fighting. The city’s location on the Sea of Azov is critical to establishing a land bridge from the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia seized from Ukraine eight years ago.
As journalists who had been largely absent from the city began to trickle back in, new images emerged of the devastation from an airstrike on a theater last month that reportedly killed hundreds of civilians seeking shelter.
Ukrainian officials have pleaded with Western powers almost daily to send more arms and further punish Moscow with sanctions, including the exclusion of Russian banks from the global financial system and a total EU embargo on Russian gas and oil.
During his visit Saturday, Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer said he expects more EU sanctions against Russia, but defended his country’s opposition so far to cutting off deliveries of Russian gas.
A package of sanctions imposed this week “won’t be the last one,” the chancellor said, acknowledging that “as long as people are dying, every sanction is still insufficient.” Austria is militarily neutral and not a member of NATO.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's visit came a day after the U.K. pledged an additional 100 million pounds ($130 million) in high-grade military equipment. Johnson also confirmed further economic support, guaranteeing an additional $500 million in World Bank lending to Ukraine, taking Britain’s total loan guarantee to up to $1 billion.
In the interview with AP, Zelenskyy noted the increased support but expressed frustration when asked if weapons and equipment Ukraine has received from the West is sufficient to shift the war’s outcome.
“Not yet,” he said, switching to English for emphasis. “Of course it’s not enough.”
Russian shelling traps residents of Mariupol
Shelling by Russian forces of Ukraine’s key port of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov has collapsed several humanitarian corridors and made conditions seldom right for people to leave.
It was not clear Saturday how many people remained trapped in the city, which had a prewar population of 430,000. Ukrainian officials have put the number at about 100,000, but earlier this week, British defense officials said 160,000 people remained trapped in the city.
Ukrainian troops have refused to surrender the city, though much of it has been razed.
Resident Sergey Petrov said Saturday that recently two shells struck around him in quick succession, but neither exploded upon landing. He was in his garage at the time and said his mother later told him, “I was born again.”
READ: Ukraine war: Does UN really matter?
“A shell flew in and broke up into two parts but it did not explode, looks like it did not land on the detonator but on its side," he said.
He added that when another shell flew in and hit the garage, "I am in shock. I don’t understand what is happening. I have a hole in my garage billowing smoke. I run away and leave everything. I come back in several hours and find another shell lying there, also unexploded.”
More flee as Ukraine warns of stepped-up Russian attacks
Civilian evacuations moved forward in patches of battle-scarred eastern Ukraine on Saturday, a day after a missile strike killed at least 52 people and wounded more than 100 at a train station where thousands clamored to leave before an expected Russian onslaught.
In the wake of the attack in Kramatorsk, several European leaders made efforts to show solidarity with Ukraine, with Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson visiting Kyiv — the capital city that Russia failed to capture and where troops retreated days ago. Johnson met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a surprise visit in which he pledged new military assistance, including 120 armored vehicles and new anti-ship missile systems.
Zelenskyy noted the increased support in an Associated Press interview, but expressed frustration when asked if weapons and other equipment Ukraine has received from the West is sufficient to shift the war's outcome.
“Not yet,” he said, switching to English for emphasis. “Of course it’s not enough.”
Zelenskyy later thanked Johnson and Nehammer during his nightly video address to the nation. He also thanked the European Commission president and the Canadian prime minister for a global fundraising event that raised more than 10 billion euros ($11 billion) for Ukrainians who have had to flee their homes. He added that democratic countries are united in working to stop the war. “Because Russian aggression was not intended to be limited to Ukraine alone. ... The entire European project is a target for Russia.”
Zelenskyy repeated his call for a complete embargo on Russian oil and gas, which he called the sources of Moscow's “self-confidence and impunity.”
More than six weeks after the invasion began, Russia has pulled its troops from the northern part of the country, around Kyiv, and refocused on the Donbas region in the east. Western military analysts said an arc of territory in eastern Ukraine was under Russian control, from Kharkiv — Ukraine’s second-largest city — in the north to Kherson in the south. But counterattacks are threatening Russian control of Kherson, according to the Western assessments, and Ukrainian forces are repelling Russian assaults elsewhere in the Donbas.
READ: Ukraine war: Does UN really matter?
Ukrainian authorities have called on civilians to get out ahead of an imminent, stepped-up offensive by Russian forces in the east. With trains not running out of Kramatorsk on Saturday, panicked residents boarded buses or looked for other ways to leave, fearing the kind of unrelenting assaults and occupations by Russian invaders that brought food shortages, demolished buildings and death to other cities.
“It was terrifying. The horror, the horror," one resident told British broadcaster Sky, recalling Friday's attack on the train station. "Heaven forbid, to live through this again. No, I don’t want to.”
Ukraine’s state railway company said residents of Kramatorsk and other parts of the Donbas could flee through other train stations. Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said 10 evacuation corridors were planned for Saturday.
Zelenskyy called the train station attack the latest example of war crimes by Russian forces and said it should motivate the West to do more to help his country defend itself.
Russia denied responsibility and accused Ukraine’s military of firing on the station to turn blame for civilian casualties on Moscow. A Russian Defense Ministry spokesman detailed the missile’s trajectory and Ukrainian troop positions to bolster the argument.
Major Gen. Igor Konashenkov alleged Ukraine’s security services were preparing a “cynical staged” media operation in Irpin, another town near Kyiv, intended to attribute civilian casualties to Russian forces — falsely, he said — and to stage the slaying of a fake Russian intelligence team that intended to kill witnesses. The claims could not be independently verified.
Western experts and Ukrainian authorities insisted that Russia attacked the station. Remnants of the rocket had the words “For the children” in Russian painted on it. The phrasing seemed to suggest the missile was sent to avenge the loss or subjugation of children, although its exact meaning remained unclear.
Ukrainian authorities have worked to identify victims and document possible war crimes in the country's north. The mayor of Bucha, a town near Kyiv where graphic evidence of civilian slayings emerged after Russian forces withdrew, said search teams were still finding bodies of people shot at close range in yards, parks and city squares.
Workers unearthed 67 bodies Friday from a mass grave near a church, according to Ukraine's prosecutor general. Russia has falsely claimed that the scenes in Bucha were staged.
Ukrainian and Western officials have repeatedly accused Russian forces of committing atrocities. A total of 176 children have been killed, while 324 more have been wounded, the Prosecutor General’s Office said Saturday.
Speaking to AP inside the heavily guarded presidential office complex in Kyiv, Zelenskyy said he is committed to negotiating a diplomatic end to the war even though Russia has “tortured” Ukraine. He also acknowledged that peace likely will not come quickly. Talks so far have not included Russian President Vladimir Putin or other top officials.
“We have to fight, but fight for life. You can’t fight for dust when there is nothing and no people. That’s why it is important to stop this war,” he said.
Ukrainian authorities have said they expect to find more mass killings once they reach the southern port city of Mariupol, which is also in the Donbas and has been subjected to a monthlong blockade and intense fighting.
As journalists who had been largely absent from the city began to trickle back in, new images emerged of the devastation from an airstrike on a theater last month that reportedly killed hundreds of civilians seeking shelter.
Military analysts had predicted for weeks that Russia would succeed in taking Mariupol but said Ukrainian defenders were still putting up a fight. The city's location on the Sea of Azov is critical to establishing a land bridge from the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia seized from Ukraine eight years ago.
Many civilians now trying to evacuate are accustomed to living in or near a war zone because Moscow-backed rebels have been fighting Ukrainian forces since 2014 in the Donbas, a mostly Russian-speaking, industrial region.
Ukrainian officials have pleaded with Western powers almost daily to send more arms and further punish Moscow with sanctions, including the exclusion of Russian banks from the global financial system and a total EU embargo on Russian gas and oil.
Nehammer said during his visit to Kyiv that he expects more EU sanctions against Russia, but he defended his country’s opposition so far to cutting off deliveries of Russian gas.
A package of sanctions imposed this week “won’t be the last one,” the chancellor said, acknowledging that “as long as people are dying, every sanction is still insufficient.” Austria is militarily neutral and not a member of NATO.
Johnson's visit came a day after the U.K. pledged an additional 100 million pounds ($130 million) in high-grade military equipment to Ukraine.
Johnson also confirmed further economic support, guaranteeing an additional $500 million in World Bank lending to Ukraine, taking Britain’s total loan guarantee to up to $1 billion.
UK: Russian naval forces firing into Ukraine
Britain’s Ministry of Defense says Russian naval forces are launching cruise missiles into Ukraine to support military operations in the eastern Donbas region and around the cities of Mariupol and Mykolaiv.
In its Saturday morning briefing, the ministry said Russia’s air forces are expected to increase activity in the south and east of Ukraine to further support these operations.
Also read: Ukraine seeks tough reply after missile kills 52 at station
The ministry said these actions come as attempts to establish a land corridor between Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, and Russian-controlled parts of the Donbas region “continue to be thwarted by Ukrainian resistance.”
U.K. officials also say Russia is continuing to attack non-combatants, such as those killed at the Kramatorsk railway station in a rocket strike on Friday.
Also read: Russian retreat reveals destruction as Ukraine asks for help
Ukraine seeks tough reply after missile kills 52 at station
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he wants a tough global response to Russia after its forces fired a missile at a crowded train station, killing at least 52 people.
Zelenskyy's voice rose in anger during his nightly address late Friday, when he said the strike on the Kramatorsk train station, where 4,000 people were trying to flee a looming Russian offensive in the east, amounted to another war crime.
Russia denied it was responsible for the strike. Among those killed were children, and dozens of people were severely injured.
Photos taken after the attack showed corpses covered with tarpaulins, and the remnants of a rocket painted with the words “For the children" in Russian. The Russian phrasing seemed to suggest the missile was sent to avenge the loss or subjugation of children, although its exact meaning remained unclear.
The strike seemed to shock world leaders.
“There are almost no words for it,” European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told reporters during a visit to Ukraine. “The cynical behavior (by Russia) has almost no benchmark anymore.”
The attack came as workers elsewhere in the country unearthed bodies from a mass grave in Bucha, a town near Kyiv, where graphic evidence of dozens of killings emerged following the withdrawal of Russian forces.
“Like the massacres in Bucha, like many other Russian war crimes, the missile attack on Kramatorsk should be one of the charges at the tribunal that must be held,” Zelenskyy said.
He said efforts would be taken “to establish every minute of who did what, who gave what orders, where the missile came from, who transported it, who gave the command and how this strike was agreed to.”
READ: Food prices soar to record levels on Ukraine war disruptions
After failing to take Kyiv in the face of stiff resistance, Russian forces have now set their sights on the eastern Donbas region, the mostly Russian-speaking, industrial area where Moscow-backed rebels have been fighting Ukrainian forces for eight years and control some places.
Although the train station is in Ukrainian government-controlled territory in the Donbas, Russia accused Ukraine of carrying out the attack. So did the region’s Moscow-backed separatists, who work closely with Russian troops.
Western experts, however, dismissed Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov's assertion that Russian forces “do not use” that type of missile. A Western official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence, said Russia’s forces have used the missile — and that given the strike’s location and impact, it was likely Russia’s.
Justin Bronk, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, added that only Russia would have reason to target railway infrastructure in the Donbas, as it is critical for the Ukrainian military's efforts to reinforce its units.
Bronk pointed to other occasions when Russian authorities have tried to deflect blame by claiming their forces no longer use an older weapon “to kind of muddy the waters and try and create doubt.” He suggested Russia specifically chose the missile type because Ukraine also possesses them.
British Defense Minister Ben Wallace denounced the attack as a war crime, and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called it “completely unacceptable.”
Ukrainian authorities and Western officials have repeatedly accused Russian forces of atrocities in the war that began with a Feb. 24 invasion. More than 4 million Ukrainians have fled the country, and millions more have been displaced. Some of the grisliest evidence has been found in towns around Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, from which Russian President Vladimir Putin's troops pulled back in recent days.
In Bucha, Mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk has said investigators found at least three sites of mass shootings of civilians and were still finding bodies in yards, parks and city squares — 90% of whom were shot.
Russia has falsely claimed that the scenes in Bucha were staged.
On Friday, workers pulled corpses from a mass grave near a church under spitting rain, lining up black body bags in rows in the mud. About 67 people were buried there, according to a statement from Prosecutor-General Iryna Venediktova's office.
Zelenskyy cited communications intercepted by the Ukrainian security service as evidence of Russian war crimes, in an excerpted interview with CBS' “60 Minutes” that aired Friday.
“There are (Russian) soldiers talking with their parents about what they stole and who they abducted. There are recordings of (Russian) prisoners of war who admitted to killing people,” he said. “There are pilots in prison who had maps with civilian targets to bomb. There are also investigations being conducted based on the remains of the dead.”
Zelenskyy's comments echo reporting from German news magazine Der Spiegel saying Germany's foreign intelligence agency had intercepted Russian military radio traffic in which soldiers may have discussed civilian killings in Bucha. The weekly also reported that the recordings indicated the Russian mercenary Wagner Group was involved in atrocities there.
German government officials would not confirm or deny the report, but two former German ministers filed a war crimes complaint Thursday. Russia has denied that its military was involved in war crimes.
Elsewhere, in anticipation of intensified attacks by Russian forces, hundreds of Ukrainians fled villages that were either under fire or occupied in the southern regions of Mykolaiv and Kherson.
Ukrainian officials have almost daily pleaded with Western powers to send more arms, and to further punish Russia with sanctions, exclusion of Russian banks from the global financial system and a total EU embargo on Russian gas and oil.
NATO nations agreed Thursday to increase their supply of weapons, and Slovakian Prime Minister Eduard Heger announced on a trip to Ukraine on Friday that his country has donated its Soviet-era S-300 air defense system to Ukraine. Zelenskyy had appealed for S-300s to help the country “close the skies” to Russian warplanes and missiles.
A senior U.S. defense official said Friday that the Pentagon believes some of Russia's retreating units were so badly damaged they are “for all intents and purposes eradicated.” The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal military assessments.
The official said the U.S. believes Russia has lost between 15% and 20% of its combat power overall since the war began. While some combat units are withdrawing to be resupplied in Russia, Moscow has added thousands of troops around Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, he said.
In Kharkiv, Lidiya Mezhiritska stood in the wreckage of her home after overnight missile strikes turned it to rubble.
“The ‘Russian world,’ they say,” she said, wryly invoking Putin’s nationalist justification for invading Ukraine. “People, children, old people, women are dying. I don’t have a machine gun. I would definitely go (fight), regardless of age.”
Sabina Nessa: Man jailed for murdering London teacher
A man who drove to London in order to attack a stranger has been jailed for life with a minimum term of 36 years for the murder of primary school teacher Sabina Nessa.
Koci Selamaj, 36, killed Nessa in a park in Kidbrooke, south-east London in September 2021, reports BBC.
CCTV footage captured him striking the 28-year-old over the head until she was unconscious, before carrying her away.
He then strangled her, removed some of her clothes and tried to hide her body.
Selamaj, a garage worker from Eastbourne in East Sussex, travelled to London on 17 September intending to assault a random woman after he was spurned by his estranged wife, the Old Bailey heard.
Nessa, who taught a year one class at Rushey Green Primary School in Catford, was found nearly 24 hours later near a community centre in the park.
Days later, Selamaj, from Eastbourne in East Sussex, was arrested in the seaside town. He pleaded guilty in February to her murder.
On Friday, he refused to come to the Old Bailey and was sentenced in his absence.
Justice Sweeney described the "savage" attack as sexually motivated. He said Nessa was the "wholly blameless victim of an absolutely appalling murder which was entirely the fault of the defendant".
It is believed Nessa had only gone through the park as she was running late and this was the quickest route to the bar where she had been due to meet a friend.
Grainy footage showed a hooded man passing her, looking back at her and running toward her before hitting her over the head 34 times in quick succession.
He used such force that parts of the weapon - a metal traffic triangle - shattered and fell to the ground, the Met Police said.
Read: Police: Officer, 2 women shot by man who exchanged gunfire
Ten minutes after dragging Nessa away, Selamaj reappeared on camera and began picking up pieces of the murder weapon from the floor. He also used tissues to clean the bench where part of the attack had taken place.
On his way back to the south coast, Selamaj dumped the warning triangle in the River Teise in Tunbridge Wells, Kent.
Police said he appeared to be "calm and collected" on his arrest.
On being cautioned through an interpreter, the Albanian national said: "What will happen if I open up now and say everything?"
Lewis Power QC said his client Selamaj had provided no explanation for why he killed Nessa, adding: "He simply accepts that he did it."
Justice Sweeney said Nessa's death added to "the sense of insecurity" particularly felt by women walking through the city at night.
"She had every right, as her family said, to be walking through the park all glammed up and out to enjoy herself after a long week at work. The defendant robbed her and them of her life," he said.
Read: France pushing for energy sanctions against Russia
The judge said it was "cowardly" of the defendant to refuse to attend his sentencing but said he had no power to force him.
'You are an animal'
Following the sentencing hearing, Det Ch Insp Neil John described Selamaj as an "evil coward".
He said: "It is highly unusual for someone to go from zero to a crime of this magnitude. We are pleased Selamaj will spend the majority of his life in prison."
Addressing the teacher's absent killer on Thursday, Nessa's parents Abdur Rouf and Azibun Nessa said in a statement: "You had no right to take her away from us in such a cruel way.
"The moment the police officer came to our house and told her she was found dead our world shattered into pieces.
"How could you do such a thing to an innocent girl walking by, minding her own business?
"You are not a human being, you are an animal."
Missile kills dozens of evacuees at Ukrainian train station
A missile hit a crowded train station in eastern Ukraine that was an evacuation point for civilians, killing dozens of people Friday, Ukrainian authorities said while warning they expected to find more evidence of possible war crimes in parts of the country previously held by Russian troops.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said thousands of people were waiting to board trains at the station when the missile struck. Photos from the scene showed bodies covered with tarps on the ground and the remannts of a rocket with the words “For the children” painted on it in Russian.
The Russian Defense Ministry denied attacking the station in Kramatorsk, a city in the eastern Donetsk region, but Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian leaders accused Russia’s military of deliberately targeting a location where only civilians were assembled.
“The inhuman Russians are not changing their methods. Without the strength or courage to stand up to us on the battlefield, they are cynically destroying the civilian population,” the president said on social media. “This is an evil without limits. And if it is not punished, then it will never stop.”
The regional governor of Donetsk, Pavlo Kyrylenko, said that 39 people were killed and 87 wounded. The office of Ukraine’s prosecutor-general said about 4,000 civilians were in and around the station, most of them women and children heeding calls to leave the area before Russia launches a full-scale offensive.
“The people just wanted to get away for evacuation,” Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said while visiting Bucha, a town north of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, where journalists and returning Ukrainians discovered scores of bodies on streets and in mass graves after Russian troops withdrew.
Venediktova spoke as workers pulled corpses from a mass grave near a church under spitting rain. Black body bags were laid out in rows in the mud. None of the dead were Russians, she said. Most of them had been shot. The prosecutor general’s office is investigating the deaths, and other mass casualites involving civilians, as possible war crimes.
After failing to take Ukraine’s capital and withdrawing from northern Ukraine, Russia has shifted its focus to the Donbas, a mostly Russian-speaking, industrial region in eastern Ukraine where Moscow-backed rebels have been fighting Ukrainian forces for eight years and control some areas. The train station is located in government-controlled territory.
Ukrainian officials warned residents this week to leave as soon as possible for safer parts of the country and said they and Russia had agreed to establish multiple evacuation routes in the east.
One analyst said only Russia would have a reason to attack civilian railway infrastructure in the Donbas, and that Ukraine would not deliberately kill its own civilians in “a war of survival.”
“The Ukrainian military is desperately trying to reinforce units in the area … and the railway stations in that area in Ukrainian-held territory are critical for movement of equipment and people,” said Justin Bronk, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London.
Read: Europe agrees to ban Russian coal, but struggles on oil, gas
Elsewhere in the Donbas, the governor of Luhansk, Serhiy Haidai, said Russia was concentrating equipment and troops and increasing shelling and bombing to aid their advance.
“We sense the end of preparations for that massive breakthrough, for that great battle which will happen here around us, in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions,” he said in a televised address.
In his nightly video address, Zelenskyy said horrors worse than the ones in Bucha already had surfaced in Borodyanka, another settlement outside the capital.
“And what will happen when the world learns the whole truth about what the Russian troops did in Mariupol?” Zelenskyy said late Thursday, referring to the besieged southern port that has seen some of the greatest suffering during Russia’s invasion. “There, on every street, is what the world saw in Bucha and other towns in the Kyiv region....The same cruelty. The same terrible crimes.”
The prosecutor general also expressed concern about the death toll in Borodyanka, where the process of retrieving bodies from shelled and collapsed buildings has just begun. Twenty-six bodies were found Thursday from the ruins of just two buildings, Venediktova said.
“We don’t know what’s under these houses,” she said, estimating it could take two weeks to find out.
Spurred by reports that Russian forces committed atrocities in areas surrounding the capital, NATO nations agreed to increase their supply of arms after Ukraine’s foreign minister pleaded for weapons from the alliance and other sympathetic countries to help face down an expected offensive in the east.
Ukrainian and several Western leaders have blamed the massacres on Moscow’s troops. The weekly magazine Der Spiegel reported Germany’s foreign intelligence agency intercepted radio messages among Russian soldiers discussing killings of civilians. Russia has falsely claimed that the scenes in Bucha were staged.
In a rare acknowledgment of the war’s cost to Russia, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov acknowledged to British broadcaster Sky News on Thursday that the country has suffered significant military causalities, calling it a “tragedy.”
Read: Ukrainian leaders predict more gruesome discoveries ahead
On Friday he told reporters that his reference to troop losses was based on the most recent Russian Defense Ministry numbers, which reported March 25 that 1,351 Russian troops had been killed in Ukraine. NATO has estimated Russia’s casualties to be several times higher.
In anticipation of intensified attacks by Russian forces, hundreds of Ukrainians fled villages in the Mykolaiv and Kherson regions that were either under attack or occupied.
Marina Morozova and her husband fled from Kherson, the first major city to fall to the Russians.
“They are waiting for a big battle. We saw shells that did not explode. It was horrifying,” she said.
Morozova, 69, said only Russian television and radio was available. The Russians handed out humanitarian aid, she said, and filmed the distribution.also
The United Nations estimates that more than 4.3 million people have fled Ukraine since the war began and that more than 12 million people are stranded in areas under attack.
On Thursday, a day after Russian forces began shelling their village in the southern Mykolaiv region, Sergei Dubovienko, 52, drove north in his small blue Lada with his wife and mother-in-law to Bashtanka, where they sought shelter in a church.
“They started destroying the houses and everything” in Pavlo-Marianovka, he said. “Then the tanks appeared from the forest. We thought that in the morning there would be shelling again, so I decided to leave.”
Two top European Union officials and the prime minister of Slovakia traveled to Kyiv on Friday, looking to shore up the EU’s support for Ukraine. Prime Minister Eduard Heger said he, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell brought trade and humanitarian aid proposals for Zelenskyy and his government.
Heger also announced that his country has donated its Soviet-era S-300 air defense system to Ukraine.
Zelenskyy had mentioned the S-300s by name when he spoke to U.S. lawmakers by video in March, appealing for anti-air systems that would allow Ukraine to “close the skies” to Russian warplanes and missiles.
Western nations have stepped up sanctions against Russia following the reports of atrocities near Kyiv. A day after the United States imposed sanctions on President Vladimir Putin’s two adult daughters, the European Union and Britain followed suit Friday.
The U.S. Congress voted to suspend normal trade relations with Russia and ban the importation of its oil, while the EU approved an embargo on coal imports. The U.N. General Assembly, meanwhile, voted to suspend Russia from the world organization’s leading human rights body.
U.S. President Joe Biden said the U.N. vote demonstrated how “Putin’s war has made Russia an international pariah.”
“The signs of people being raped, tortured, executed — in some cases having their bodies desecrated — are an outrage to our common humanity,” Biden said.