The number of people killed in a Russian airstrike on a theatre being used as a bomb shelter in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol has risen to 300, officials have said.
The city’s government announced the new number on its official Telegram channel this morning, citing ‘eyewitnesses’ for the toll of ‘about 300’.
The theatre in the besieged city of Mariupol was hit on March 16.
At the time the Russian word for ‘children’ was written on the ground outside the building and clearly visible from the air.
Soon after the airstrike, Ludmyla Denisova, the Ukrainian Parliament’s human rights commissioner, said more than 1,300 people had been sheltering in the building.
According to the report by AP, Mariupol has been the scene of some of the worst devastation of the war, which has seen Russia relentlessly besiege and pummel Ukraine’s cities. The misery inside them is such that nearly anyone who can is trying to leave and those left behind face desperate food shortages in a country once known as the breadbasket for the world.
In the shelled city of Kharkiv, mostly elderly women came to collect food and other urgent supplies. In the capital of Kyiv, ashes of the dead are piling up at the main crematorium because so many relatives have left, leaving urns unclaimed.
With Ukrainian soldiers battling Russia’s invasion force to a near stalemate in many places and the president urging people to remain steadfast, the U.S. and the European Union announced a move to further squeeze Russia: a new partnership to reduce Europe’s reliance on Russian energy and slowly squeeze off the billions of dollars the Kremlin gets from sales of fossil fuels.