Ukraine orders end to defence of Mariupol
Agencies
KYIV: Ukraine on Friday ordered its last troops holed up in Mariupol’s besieged Azovstal steelworks to lay down their arms after nearly three months of desperate resistance against a ferocious Russian assault.
Russia’s flattening of the strategic port city has drawn multiple accusations of war crimes, including a deadly attack on a maternity ward, and Ukraine has begun a reckoning for captured Russian troops.
The first post-invasion trial of a Russian soldier for war crimes neared its climax in Kyiv, after 21-year-old sergeant Vadim
Shishimarin admitted to killing an unarmed civilian early in the offensive. The verdict is due on Monday.
The fighting is fiercest in the eastern region of Donbas, a Russian-speaking area that has been partially controlled by prokremlin separatists since 2014. President Volodymyr Zelensky said the assaults had turned the Donbas into “hell”.
Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu said his forces’ campaign in Lugansk was “nearing completion”.
The US Congress approved a $40-billion aid package, including funds to enhance Ukraine’s armoured vehicle fleet and air defence system. And meeting in Germany, G7 industrialised nations pledged $19.8 billion to shore up Ukraine’s shattered public finances.
In other developments, Russia will cut off natural gas to Finland on Saturday, the Finnish state energy company said, just days after Finland applied to join Nato. Finland had refused Moscow’s demand that it pay for gas in rubles.
The cutoff is not expected to have any major immediate effect. Natural gas accounted for just 6% of Finland’s total energy consumption in 2020, Finnish broadcaster YLE said.
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