Mariupol mayor says more than 10,000 civilians killed

The mayor of the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol said more than 10,000 civilians have died in the Russian siege of his city, and that the death toll could surpass 20,000, as weeks of attacks and privation leave the bodies of Mariupol’s people “carpeted through the streets”.

Speaking by phone on Monday, Mayor Vadym Boychenko also accused Russian forces of having blocked weeks of thwarted humanitarian convoys into the city in an attempt to conceal the carnage there from the outside world.
It came as unverified reports emerged on Monday of Russian forces using chemical weapons in Mariupol.

Mariupol has been cut off by Russian attacks that began soon after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine in late February, and has suffered some of the most brutal assaults of the war. Boychenko gave new details of recent allegations by Ukrainian officials that Russian forces have brought mobile cremation equipment to Mariupol to dispose of the corpses of victims of the siege.

Russian forces have taken many bodies to a huge shopping centre where there are storage facilities and refrigerators, Boychenko said.
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“Mobile crematoriums have arrived in the form of trucks: You open it, and there is a pipe inside and these bodies are burned,” he said.
Boychenko spoke from a location in Ukrainian-controlled territory but outside Mariupol. The mayor said he had several sources for his description of the allegedly methodic burning of corpses by Russian forces in the city, but did not detail the sources of his information.
The discovery of large numbers of apparently executed civilians after Russian forces retreated from cities around the capital, Kyiv, this month has already prompted widespread condemnation and charges from Ukrainians and the West that Russia is committing war crimes in Ukraine.

On Monday, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said Britain was trying to verify reports that Russia has used chemical weapons in an attack on Mariupol.

Western officials have previously expressed concerns that Russia, finding its February 24 invasion of its neighbour grinding into a protracted conflict, could resort to more extreme measures, including chemical weapons.