More than 10,000 civilians have died in Mariupol and their corpses have been “carpeted through the streets”, the city’s mayor has said on Monday.
Mayor Vadym Boychenko made further claims the full death toll could surpass 20,000 - twice the number he has already claimed to have died.
The mayor also said Russian forces have taken many bodies to a huge shopping center where there are storage facilities and refrigerators.
“Mobile crematoriums have arrived in the form of trucks: You open it, and there is a pipe inside and these bodies are burned,” he told The Associated Press by phone.
About 120,000 civilians in Mariupol are in need of food, water, warmth and communications, the mayor said.
Russian forces have relied increasingly on bombarding cities - a strategy that has left many urban areas flattened and killed thousands of people.
Ukrainian authorities have accused Russian forces of committing atrocities including a massacre in the town of Bucha, airstrikes on hospitals and a missile attack that killed at least 57 people last week at a train station.
The world has reacted in horror to the atrocities.
In Bucha on Monday, the work of exhuming bodies from a mass grave in a churchyard resumed.
It comes as Russian forces have suffered “extremely high” losses in Ukraine, western officials said.
“It’s also symptomatic of a poorly-led, ill-disciplined and frustrated set of Russian forces who have sustained extremely high casualties and are becoming increasingly difficult to lead and ineffective,” one western official explained.
“Unfortunately, they are also becoming increasingly desensitised in the course of this conflict.
“The Russian way of urban warfare was never pretty and we are seeing that in degrading, and revolting and barbaric detail at the moment.
“These indiscriminate attacks targeting of civilians, alleged war crimes, have all shocked and horrified us all.”
