Authorities in Ukraine’s Mariupol on Thursday said around 30,000 people have fled the besieged city and that they were clarifying information on possible victims of the Russian shelling of a theatre sheltering civilians a day earlier. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed German parliament via video earlier on Thursday, asking them to help destroy a new “wall” he said Russia was erecting in Europe. FRANCE 24 brought you Thursday’s events as they unfolded in the liveblog below.
Russia canceled a UN Security Council vote on a “humanitarian” resolution on Ukraine, scheduled for Friday, after failing to secure co-sponsorship of the draft text from China and India, suggesting that neither Beijing nor New Delhi were going to support it, according to diplomats. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday that he agreed with President Joe Biden that war crimes have been committed in Ukraine. Rescue workers were searching for survivors in the rubble of a theatre in the besieged city of Mariupol on Thursday, after Ukraine said a powerful Russian air strike had hit the building where hundreds of people had been sheltering from the war. The number of casualties is still unknown. In an emotional video address to German parliament on Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on the country to tear down the new “wall” he said Russia was building between “free and unfree” Europe, invoking the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Kremlin on Thursday rejected the top UN court’s order to halt the Ukraine offensive. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague ruling called for an “immediate” suspension. The Kremlin’s spokesman said Russia “cannot take this decision into account”. Ukraine said Wednesday that Russia had destroyed a theatre harbouring more than a thousand people in the besieged port city of Mariupol, with the death toll as yet unknown. President Joe Biden called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal” on Wednesday, triggering an immediate angry riposte from Russia. In its latest figures, the UNHCR said more than 3 million Ukrainians have fled the country since the war began on February 24, with more than 100,000 leaving between Wednesday and Thursday. The UN children’s agency said around half of those who have fled are children.Follow our live updates below. If updates do not appear, please refresh the page.
© Studio graphique France Médias Monde
(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS, AFP and AP)
