“so that a fly can’t get through”. Putin told Shoigu, in remarks broadcast on state television: “There is no need to climb into these catacombs and crawl underground.”
“We don’t know the precise civilian figure because we haven’t been able to get them out. We need a day’s ceasefire for this to happen,” Boichenko, who is no longer in Mariupol, said. “The civilians were living in desperate conditions in a network of underground tunnels, surrounded by Russian troops.
“The bodies of the dead were being brought by truckload and actually simply being dumped in mounds,” an aide to Boichenko, Piotr Andryushchenko, said on the Telegram messaging app.The mayor estimated that more than 20,000 Mariupol residents had been killed since Russian forces began attacking the city during the early days of Putin’s invasion.
UN human rights monitors in Ukraine have also documented what appeared to be the use of weapons with indiscriminate effects, causing civilian casualties, by Ukrainian armed forces in the east of the country, the OHCHR said.