Russia’s bombardment in the east of Ukraine continued on Friday. In the streets of Mariupol, where 350,000 civilians have been stranded with little food or water, Russia’s armed forces were “tightening the noose” around the city, a spokesperson for the Russian defence ministry said. In the eastern city of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s state emergency service said a multistorey teaching building had been shelled on Friday morning, killing one person, wounding 11 and trapping one other in the rubble.
Russian missiles struck an aircraft repair plant in Ukraine’s western city of Lviv, 50 miles from the border with Poland and a safe haven for hundreds of thousands of internally displaced Ukrainians. Blasts were heard at about 6am on Friday, preceded by the sound of air raid sirens, and a mushroom-shaped plume of smoke could be seen rising in the sky.
Shells were said to have struck the eastern city of Kramatorsk, killing two people and wounding six. In the northern part of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, one person was killed and four others wounded after parts of a Russian missile fell on a residential building.
Hundreds of people remain buried under the rubble of a theatre in the devastated city of Mariupol that was hit by a Russian airstrike on Wednesday, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said. In his latest video address, the Ukrainian president said more than 130 people have been rescued so far, but officials say rescue efforts have been hindered by the complete breakdown of social services in the city and fears of future Russian attacks.
Kyiv city administration said 222 people had been killed in the city since Russia’s invasion began on 24 February, including 60 civilians and four children. It said a further 889 people had been wounded, including 241 civilians and 18 children. The Guardian has not been able to verify these figures.
Russian forces are “holding captive” a Ukrainian journalist, Victoria Roshchyna, according to the Ukrainian media outlet Hromadske. In a statement, Hromadske said it believed Roshchyna was detained by the Russian FSB around 15 March.
China’s president, Xi Jinping, told his US counterpart, Joe Biden, on Friday that conflicts and confrontations such as the events unfolding in Ukraine were in no one’s interests, according to Chinese state media. “The Ukraine crisis is something that we don’t want to see,” Xi was quoted by Chinese media as saying.
Vladimir Putin praised Russian “unity” over what the Kremlin is calling its special operation in Ukraine during a rare public speech at the national stadium in Moscow. As Putin was finishing his speech, the broadcast was suddenly cut off and state television showed patriotic songs. The Kremlin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov blamed a “technical failure” for the cutoff.
A World Food Programme (WFP) official said on Friday that food supply chains in Ukraine were collapsing, with a portion of infrastructure destroyed and many grocery stores and warehouses now empty. Jakob Kern, the WFP’s emergency coordinator for the Ukraine crisis, also expressed concern about the situation in “encircled cities” such as Mariupol, saying supplies were running out and its convoys had not yet been able to enter the city.
Pope Francis has denounced the “perverse abuse of power” on display in Russia’s war in Ukraine and called for aid to Ukrainians, who he said had been attacked in their “identity, history and tradition” and were “defending their land”. Francis’s comments were some of his strongest yet in asserting Ukraine’s right to exist as a sovereign state and to defend itself against Russia’s invasion.
