Mariupol deputy mayor claims 1,207 bodies collected from streets
The city authorities said Mariupol had experienced "nine days of continuous shelling of the civilian population" with "half a million people without light, water, heat and communications."
A total of 1,207 civilians have died during a nine-day siege by Russian forces of Ukraine's port city of Mariupol, its local authorities said on Wednesday.
The deputy mayor of the besieged southern port of Mariupol says he doesn't know how many people have been killed in total in the city, but the most recent figure is 1,207, reports BBC.
These are "just bodies that we collected on the street", Mariupol deputy mayor Serhiy Orlov said.
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He said that 47 people had been buried in a mass grave as it was not possible to reach burial sites outside the city. "Not all of them were identified," he added.
Orlov said it has not been possible to evacuate people from the city or bring in aid. About 100 people trying to flee in private cars had to turn back on Wednesday, he said, after Russian forces at a checkpoint started to shoot "not directly into the cars, but around the cars".
Earlier Wednesday, a Russian air strike seriously damaged a children's hospital in the city of more than 400,000, injuring 17 staff, in an attack condemned by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy as an "atrocity" and described as "barbaric" by the White House.
The city authorities said Mariupol had experienced "nine days of continuous shelling of the civilian population" with "half a million people without light, water, heat and communications."
Several evacuation efforts have failed and Ukrainian ombudsman Lyudmyla Denisova said on Wednesday that the city faces a humanitarian crisis, while the planned evacuation route to Zaporizhzhia in the northwest has not been demined.
The city's mayor Vadym Boichenko posted a video in which he said: "My heart today is full of rage."
"Today Russia led by its leader President (Vladimir) Putin carried out an air strike on a peaceful city, firing on a children's hospital," he said.
"They wanted to take away the lives of our children, our women, our doctors."
He asked for Ukraine's international partners to help and for a no-fly zone to be established over Ukraine.
"We will hold on to the end," he vowed.
