Authorities in the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol said that nearly 40,000 people have fled over the past week. That's nearly 10% of its 430,000 population.
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The city council in the Azov Sea port city said Sunday that 39,426 residents have safely evacuated from Mariupol in their own vehicles. It said the evacuees used more than 8,000 vehicles to leave via a humanitarian corridor via Berdyansk to Zaporizhzhia.
Encircled by Russian troops, the strategic city has faced relentless Russian bombardment for three weeks. Local authorities have said the siege has cut off food, water, and energy supplies, and killed at least 2,300 people, some of whom had to be buried in mass graves. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Sunday that the siege of Mariupol would go down in history for what he said were war crimes committed by Russian troops.
Authorities in Ukraine's eastern city of Kharkiv said at least five civilians had been killed in the latest Russian shelling.
Regional police in Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, said the victims of the Russian artillery attack early Sunday included a 9-year-old boy.
Kharkiv has been besieged by Russian forces since the start of the invasion.
Also, Sunday, the governor of the northeastern Sumy region, Dmytro Zhyvytskyy, said on Facebook that 71 orphan babies had been safely evacuated via a humanitarian corridor. Zhyvytskyy said the orphans would be taken to an unspecified foreign country and that most of them required constant medical attention.
Like many other Ukrainian cities, Sumy has been besieged by Russian troops and faced repeated shelling.
Russia's military, meanwhile, said it has carried out a new series of strikes on Ukrainian military facilities with long-range hypersonic and cruise missiles.
Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said Sunday that the Kinzhal hypersonic missile hit a Ukrainian fuel depot in Kostiantynivka near the Black Sea port of Mykolaiv. The strike marked the second day in a row that Russia used the Kinzhal, a weapon capable of striking targets 2,000 kilometers (1,250 miles) away at a speed 10 times the speed of sound.
The previous day, the Russian military said the Kinzhal was used for the first time in combat to destroy an ammunition depot in Diliatyn in the Carpathian Mountains in western Ukraine.
Konashenkov noted that the Kalibr cruise missiles launched by Russian warships from the Caspian Sea were also involved in the strike on the fuel depot in Kostiantynivka. He said Kalibr missiles launched from the Black Sea were used to destroy an armor repair plant in Nizhyn in the Chernihiv region in northern Ukraine.
Konashenkov added that another strike by air-launched missiles hit a Ukrainian facility in Ovruch in the northern Zhytomyr region where foreign fighters and Ukrainian special forces were based.
In the besieged Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, authorities said the Russian military had bombed an art school where about 400 people had taken refuge, destroying the building. There was no immediate word on casualties.
Russian forces on Wednesday also bombed a theater in Mariupol where civilians took shelter. The authorities said 130 people were rescued but many more could remain under the debris.
Mariupol, a strategic port on the Azov Sea, has been encircled by Russian troops, cut off from energy, food, and water supplies, and has faced a relentless bombardment.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the siege of Mariupol would go down in history for what he said were war crimes committed by Russian troops.
Zelenskyy, meanwhile, has ordered the activities of 11 political parties with links to Russia to be suspended.
The largest of them is the Opposition Platform for Life, which has 44 out of 450 seats in the country's parliament. The party is led by Viktor Medvedchuk, who has friendly ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is the godfather of Medvedchuk's daughter.
Also on the list is the Nashi party led by Yevheniy Murayev. Before the Russian invasion, British authorities had warned that Russia wanted to install Murayev as the leader of Ukraine.
Speaking in a video address early Sunday, Zelenskyy said that "given a large-scale war unleashed by the Russian Federation and links between it and some political structures, the activities of a number of political parties is suspended for the period of the martial law." He added that "activities by politicians aimed at discord and collaboration will not succeed."
Zelenskyy's announcement follows the introduction of martial law that envisages a ban on parties associated with Russia.
Zelenskyy has also signed a decree that combines all national TV channels into one platform, citing the importance of a "unified information policy" under martial law, his office said in a statement.
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