200 bodies are found in Mariupol ruins

Discovered in the basement of an apartment building by workers digging through rubble in the city

Workers digging through the rubble of an apartment building in Mariupol found 200 bodies in the basement, Ukrainian authorities said Tuesday, as more horrors come to light in the ruined city that has seen some of the worst suffering of the threemonth-old war.

The bodies were decomposing and the stench hung over the neighbourhood, said Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to the mayor. He did not say when they were discovered, but the sheer number of victims makes it one of the deadliest known attacks of the war.

Heavy fighting, meanwhile, continued in the Donbas, the eastern industrial region that Moscow’s forces are intent on seizing. Russian troops intensified their efforts to encircle and capture Sievierodonetsk and neighbouring cities.

Mariupol was relentlessly pounded during a nearly three-month siege that ended last week after some 2,500 Ukrainian fighters abandoned a steel plant where they had made their stand.

Russian forces already held the rest of the city, where an estimated 100,000 people remain out of a prewar population of 450,000, many of them trapped during the encirclement with little food, water, heat or electricity.

At least 21,000 people were killed in the siege, according to Ukrainian authorities, who have accused Russia of trying to cover up the horrors by bringing in mobile cremation equipment and by burying the dead in mass graves.

During the assault on Mariupol, Russian airstrikes hit a maternity hospital and a theatre where civilians were taking shelter.

An investigation by The Associated Press found close to 600 people died in the theatre attack, double the figure estimated by Ukrainian authorities.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused the Russians of waging “total war” and of seeking to inflict as much death and destruction as is possible on his country.

“Indeed, there has not been such a war on the European continent for 77 years,” Zelenskyy said, referring to when the Second World War ended.

Moscow-backed separatists have fought Ukrainian forces in the Donbas for eight years and hold large swaths of territory.

Sievierodonetsk and neighbouring cities are the only part of the Donbas’s Luhansk region still under Ukrainian government control.

Russian forces have achieved “some localized successes” despite strong Ukrainian resistance along dug-in positions, British military authorities said.

Moscow’s troops also took over the town of Svitlodarsk and raised the Russian flag there, Ukrainian media reported. Svitlodarsk is about 50 kilometres southeast of the strategically important city of Kramatorsk.

A pair of top Russian officials appeared to acknowledge that Moscow’s advance has been slower than expected, though they vowed the offensive would ultimately achieve its goals.

Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of Russia’s Security Council. said the Russian government “is not chasing deadlines.”

And Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu told a meeting of a Russialed security alliance of former Soviet states that Moscow is deliberately slowing down its offensive assault to allow residents of some of the encircled cities to evacuate — though forces have repeatedly hit civilian targets.

‘‘ Indeed, there has not been such a war on the European continent for 77 years.

VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY UKRAINIAN PRESIDENT