News Desk :
A senior negotiator on the Ukrainian side, Mykhailo Podoliak, urged “a real Easter truce” and asked Russia to consider “the remnants of its reputation.” Follow DW for the latest.
Iryna Vereshchuk, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister, said that no humanitarian routes were established to bring civilians and the wounded out of Mariupol on Sunday, reports DW News.
Vereshchuk blamed Russian forces for continuing their siege on the southern port city that has faced weeks of bombardment.
The Ukrainian side would try again on Monday, Vereshchuk said. She called on UN Secretary General Antonio Guterress to demand a ceasefire “if he is preparing to talk about peace” ahead of his travels to Moscow and then Kyiv next week.
The UN refugee agency said 5,186,744 Ukrainians have fled since the start of Russia’s invasion, an increase of 23,058 on Saturday’s figures.
In April so far, more than 1,151,000 Ukrainians have fled their country compared with 3.4 million during the month of March.
UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi wrote on Twitter that this Orthodox Easter “will be another day of fear, anguish, loss and separation from loved ones, as war continues to rage without mercy.”
The International Organization of Migration (IOM) estimates that more than 7.7 million people are internally displaced within Ukraine.
Serhiy Gaidai, the regional governor of Luhansk, said several civilians were killed by Russian shelling on Orthodox Easter Sunday.
In a video address to mark the holiday, Gaidai said, “Today, once again, civilians have died. Our compatriots. The (Russians) do not hold anything sacred.”
Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych has said Sunday Russian forces are again attempting to storm the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol where
Ukrainian forces and civilians are sheltering following a weeks-long siege of the southern port city.
On Facebook, Arestovych wrote, “Russian troops are trying to finish off the defenders of Azovstal and more than 1,000 civilians who are hiding at the plant.”
Russian troops have surrounded the plant since early March. On Saturday, Ukrainian officials issued similar warnings and said Russian forces were laying siege to the plant.
The blue and yellow Ukrainian flag flew among those gathered on St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican this Orthodox Easter weekend as Pope Francis appealed again for a truce in Ukraine.
He called for an easing of “the suffering of exhausted people.”
Francis added that, “Instead of halting, the war has become worse.”
Echoing the calls of senior Ukrainian government officials, Francis said, “I renew the appeal for an Easter truce, the smallest tangible sign of a willingness for peace.”
Russian ambassador Anatoly Antonov said Sunday that the work of Russian diplomatic missions in the US was essentially “blockaded” by US government entities.
“Accounts of our two consulates in Houston and New York have been closed by Bank of America,” Antonov was quoted as saying by the RIA news agency.
He also said Russian diplomatic sites were receiving threats via telephone and in the mail.
The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said it is “extremely concerned” about the detention of several members of its monitoring mission in the eastern part of the country.
In a brief tweet, the Vienna-based organization said several of their mission members “have been deprived of their liberty in Donetsk and Luhansk” and that OSCE was “using all available channels to facilitate their release.”
An OSCE spokesperson failed to provide specifics such as how many Ukrainian nationals involved in the monitoring mission had been detained or when or who may be holding them. Several OSCE observers have been killed or injured since the monitoring mission in eastern Ukraine began eight years ago.
Russia recently vetoed extending the mission. It is one of 57 participating member states that form the OSCE.
“The lives of tens of thousands, including women, children and older people, are at stake in Mariupol,” the UN’s coordinator for the Ukraine crisis, Amin Awad, warned.
“We need a pause in fighting right now to save lives,” he said in a statement. “They must be allowed to safely evacuate now, today. Tomorrow could be too late.”
Russia claims to control the entirety of the port city save for a steelworks plant where several thousands of Ukrainian fighters are holed up. Earlier on Sunday, Ukraine also called for a truce as both Russia and Ukraine mark Orthodox Easter this Sunday.
Chess.com, one of the most popular chess websites in the world, is now inaccessible in Russia. According to the Interfax news agency, the country’s media supervisor Roskomnadzor has blocked two of its pages with information about the war in Ukraine.
Russian prosecutors demanded the move on Saturday. As the site uses https network protocol, barring the access to those pages has reportedly caused the entire site to be inaccessible in Russia.
Previously, Russian grandmaster Sergei Karjakin had called for the pages with information about what Russia calls its “special military operations” in Ukraine to be blocked.
The Russian Ministry of Defense said Sunday that it had struck nine Ukrainian military targets overnight.
Included among those targets were four arms depots in the Kharkiv region where artillery is stored and a facility producing military grade explosives in Dnipropetrovsk.
