Ukrainian authorities said Sunday that Russia's military bombed an art school sheltering some 400 people in the port city of Mariupol, where heavy street fighting is underway weeks into a devastating Russian siege.
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The fall of Mariupol would allow Russian forces across southern and eastern Ukraine to link up. But Western military analysts say that even if the surrounded city is taken, the troops battling for control there a block at a time may be too depleted to help secure Russian breakthroughs on other fronts.
Three weeks into the invasion, Western governments and analysts see the conflict shifting to a war of attrition, with bogged down Russian forces launching long-range missiles at cities and military bases as Ukrainian forces carry out hit-and-run attacks and seek to sever their supply lines.
The strike on the art school was the second time in less than a week that local officials reported an attack on a public building where Mariupol residents had taken shelter. A bomb hit a theater where more than 1,000 people were believed to be sheltering on Wednesday.
There was no immediate word on casualties from the reported strike on the school, which The Associated Press could not independently verify. Ukrainian officials have not given an update on the search of the theater since Friday when they said at least 130 people had been rescued and another 1,300 were trapped by rubble.
City officials and aid groups have described dire conditions in Mariupol, where food, water, and electricity have run low and the fighting has prevented humanitarian convoys from reaching the city. The Russian siege also severed communication lines in Mariupol, making it difficult to verify reports from the city.
The strategic port on the Azov Sea has been under bombardment for over three weeks and has seen some of the worst horrors of the war in Ukraine. At least 2,300 people have died, some of whom had to be buried in mass graves, city officials have said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Russian forces are blockading Ukraine's largest cities to create a "humanitarian catastrophe" with the aim of persuading Ukrainians to cooperate with them. He says Russians are preventing supplies from reaching surrounded cities in the center and southeast of the country.
"This is a totally deliberate tactic," Zelenskyy said in his nighttime video address to the nation, filmed outside in Kyiv, with the presidential office in the lamplight behind him. He said more than 9,000 people were able to leave besieged Mariupol in the past day, and in all more than 180,000 people have been able to flee to safety through humanitarian corridors.
