The besieged port city of Mariupol in south-eastern Ukraine is "90%" destroyed and "40% of its infrastructure" is "unrecoverable", its mayor Vadim Boïtchenko announced on Monday.
"The sad news is that 90% of the city's infrastructure is destroyed and 40% of it is irrecoverable," he said during a press conference, adding that "about 130,000 inhabitants" there were still stuck.
Before the war, Mariupol had almost half a million inhabitants.
The attacks would come from "Russian ships"
“The Russian army brutally destroys Mariupol.
(…) The bombardments are incessant”, with in particular “multiple rocket launchers”, added Vadim Boïtchenko.
According to him, the attacks against Mariupol come in particular “from the sea”, where there are “Russian ships”.
"We plan to evacuate the remaining residents, but we cannot do it today," he said.
Russians and Ukrainians have for several days been rejecting responsibility for the difficulties encountered in the evacuations from Mariupol to Zaporozhye, more than 200 km to the west.
Mariupol is devastated after a siege of more than a month by the Russian army which pounded it, leaving the population on their own, in terrible conditions.
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