Russian forces in Ukraine are blasting cities and killing civilians but no longer making progress on the ground, Western countries said on Thursday, as a war Moscow was thought to have hoped to win within days entered its fourth week.
Local officials said rescuers in the besieged southern port of Mariupol were combing the rubble of a theatre where women and children had been sheltering, bombed by Russian forces the previous day.
“The bomb shelter held. Now the rubble is being cleared. There are survivors. We don’t know about the (number of) victims yet,” mayoral adviser Petro Andrushchenko told Reuters by phone.
Russia denied striking the theatre, which commercial satellite pictures showed had the word “children” marked out on the ground in front before it was blown up.
Mariupol has suffered the worst humanitarian catastrophe of the war, with hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in basements with no food, water or power for weeks. Russian forces have begun letting some people out in private cars this week but have blocked aid convoys from reaching the city.
Viacheslav Chaus, governor of Chernihiv, a northern city that has been intensely bombarded, said 53 civilians had been killed there in the past 24 hours. The toll could not be independently verified.
In the capital Kyiv, a building in the Darnytsky district was extensively damaged by what the authorities said was debris from a missile shot down early in the morning.
As residents cleared glass and carried bags of possessions away, a man knelt weeping by the body of a woman which lay close to a doorway, covered in a bloody sheet.
Although both sides have pointed to limited progress in peace talks this week, President Vladimir Putin, who ordered Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24, showed little sign of relenting.
In a vituperative televised speech, he inveighed against “traitors and scum” at home who helped the West, and said the Russian people would spit them out like gnats.
Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of Putin’s security council, said the United States had stoked “disgusting” Russophobia in an attempt to force Russia to its knees: “It will not work – Russia has the might to put all of our brash enemies in their place.”
Kyiv and its Western allies believe Russia launched the unprovoked war to subjugate a neighbour that Putin calls an artificial state carved out of Russia. Moscow says it is carrying out a “special operation” to disarm it and “denazify”.
Heavily outnumbered Ukrainian forces have prevented Moscow from capturing any of Ukraine’s biggest cities so far despite the largest assault on a European state since World War Two. More than 3 million Ukrainians have fled and thousands of civilians and combatants have died.
