Filenews 22 April 2022
Russian forces are tightening the cordon with clashes intensifying in many parts of eastern Ukraine, according to the country's armed forces.
Russian units are escalating clashes along the entire front line in the Donetsk region, Ukraine's general staff said in a statement today.
Russia is carrying out attack operations near the Zarishne region. Russian forces are trying to march around the city of Rubizne in the Luhansk region. The clashes continue around the city of Popasna, as reported by the ANA. According to the information of the staff, part of this city is already controlled by Russian troops.
Fierce clashes are also taking place around Marginka, as in previous days. Russian units tried to advance there with the support of artillery.
The German news agency (dpa) could not independently cross-check the information on the war front.
Dramatic situation in Mariupol
At the same time, the situation in Mariupol is dramatic, where the mayor made a new call for a "complete evacuation" of the city.
Russia claims that Mariupol has been occupied in its entirety, except for the Azofstal factory, for which Vladimir Putin has ordered that it be excluded from the army as Ukrainian fighters are there.
"We only need one thing – the complete evacuation of the population. About 100,000 people remain in Mariupol," Vadim Boichenko told national television, as broadcast by Reuters.
Trapped in Azofstall
Meanwhile, trapped civilians, dead and wounded, under buildings that have collapsed at the Azofstall factory in Mariupol, speaks of a Ukrainian fighter on the spot.
In an interview with the BBC, Deputy Commander Sviatoslav Palamar from Azov's nationalist battalion claims that Russian forces are constantly bombing the factory.
As he tells the British network: "All the buildings in Azofstall have been destroyed. They drop bombs that destroy warehouses and cause enormous damage. We have wounded and dead inside the warehouses. Some civilians remain trapped under the buildings."
For the civilians at the steel factory, he says: "They are in basements where 80-100 people have found shelter in each one, but it is not clear how many are in total, as some buildings were destroyed and the fighters could not reach them because of the bombings," he pointed out.
As the BBC points out, however, these claims have not been independently confirmed.
9,000 civilians in a mass grave?
At the same time, the descriptions of up to 9,000 civilians who have lost their lives and are buried in a mass grave are shocking.
The new satellite images come from the Manhush area, near Mariupol, with analysts claiming that the Russians built another mass grave to bury more than 200 new bodies.
"In the village of Manhush, the invaders may have buried between 3,000 and 9,000 residents of Mariupol. This is supported by a comparison with satellite photographs of a mass grave in Boucha, where 70 bodies were found. In April 9 photos from Maxar, the site of the mass burial in Manchus is 20 times larger. The conquerors were constantly digging and burying corpses in the following days. Our sources report that in such tombs the bodies lie on different levels (layers)," the Mariupol city council tells Telegram.
"Russia rejected the proposal for a ceasefire"
Meanwhile, hopes for an Easter truce are dashed following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's statement yesterday that Russia rejected the proposal for a ceasefire during the Orthodox Easter.
Ukraine's president said in his video message that he still harbours hopes for peace in the war that has cost the lives of thousands of civilians and soldiers and created millions of refugees.
"Pseudo-referendum" in Kherson and Zaporizia
Zelensky also accused Russia of seeking to organise a pseudo-referendum on the independence of the regions of Kherson and Zaporizia, which has been occupied by its army, in the southern part of the country.
In his address on Thursday night, Mr Zelensky demanded that the inhabitants of the occupied zones should not give any personal data, such as the serial numbers of their passports, when requested to do so by the Russian armed forces.
"They don't just want to take stock (...). Nor should they hand out humanitarian aid of any kind to you. It is about hacking a so-called referendum on our territory if an order from Moscow arrives to organise this comedy," the Ukrainian head of state said.
Ukraine already accused in early March of seeking to stage a "referendum" in Kherson in the image of that of 2014, when it proceeded to annex the Crimean peninsula. The annexation is declared illegal by Kiev and Western countries.
In eastern Ukraine, the two regions of the pro-Russian separatists Danielsk and Lugansk have already declared their independence as "people's republics", following referendums that also declare Kiev and the international community null and void as non-existent.
"There will be no people's republic of Kherson. If someone wants a new annexation, new even stronger sanctions will hit Russia," Mr Zelensky said.
Kherson is the first major Ukrainian city occupied by the Russian army after the invasion that began on February 24. A little further northeast, Russian troops have also occupied a gigantic sector around the city of Zaporizia, but the city itself is still controlled by the Ukrainians.
