Mariupol's mayor says more than 5,000 civilians have been killed in besieged Ukrainian city

More than 5,000 civilians have been killed in Mariupol, Ukraine, since Russian troops took control of the city, local authorities stated on Wednesday.

Mayor Vadym Boichenko said that of the thousands reported dead, 210 were children.

On Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he had asked French President Emmanuel Macron to help those trapped in Mariupol. Zelensky also said that Macron agreed to help provide technical assistance and expert support for investigations into crimes committed in Ukraine by Russia.

In an interview with Turkey’s Habertürk Television, Zelensky accused Russian troops of trying to cover up their actions in the besieged coastal city — and alleged that the Russians were not allowing humanitarian aid into the city “until they clear it all up.”

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk accused Russian forces last week of blocking a convoy of buses headed to Mariupol to evacuate civilians. "The Russian Federation, again, does not let our buses pass," Vereshchuk told the Ukrainian news agency Unian. She alleged that Russian soldiers had stolen 12 Ukrainian trucks that were delivering aid to Mariupol.

An International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) team had tried to reach Mariupol, but turned around last week as a result of what it described as inadequate security protections for rescuers. The group later said that it had managed to help around 1,000 civilians safely get to Zaporizhzhia, a government-controlled Ukrainian city located roughly 128 miles to the north, after they left Mariupol on their own for Berdyansk, a city roughly 52 miles west of Mariupol. Before Russia invaded Ukraine, Mariupol's population was 400,000.

Pascal Hundt, head of ICRC's delegation in Ukraine, told the Associated Press that conditions on the humanitarian route to Mariupol had prevented the team from saving civilians trapped in the besieged city.

“When you travel with a convoy with buses, you have to stop at the checkpoint. You have to explain who you are, what you are doing there. They may be not necessarily aware of you coming in, and then it takes time, and then you proceed to the next one and you start again,” he said.

“In the evening, there’s a curfew. People cannot move. Everybody gets stressed, including the soldiers at the checkpoint,” Hundt added. “It took us five days to do that operation. … You can imagine the difficulties we faced.”

In recent weeks, a theater in Mariupol was bombed by a Russian airstrike, local authorities said. Satellite pictures show that the theater was marked with large white letters that read “CHILDREN” in Russian.

Ukrainian officials also said “several bombs” were dropped on a children’s hospital in the same city — leaving three people dead, including a 6-year-old girl.

Zelensky previously said that Mariupol had been “reduced to ashes” by Russian airstrikes, and called the attacks "a terror that will be remembered for centuries to come."

After announcing new sanctions against Russia — including President Vladimir Putin’s two adult daughters — on Wednesday, President Biden decried the “major war crimes” he says are being discovered in Ukraine, after horrifying photos taken in Bucha this week showed the bodies of “executed people” discovered after Russian forces withdrew from the city.

Cover thumbnail photo: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP