Smoke rises from an airstrike on the Mariupol steel plant where 1,000 people reportedly sheltering.
Earlier, Mariupol’s deputy mayor, Sergei Orlov, appeared on BBC Breakfast in the UK earlier, and there he said "It’s very hard to talk to people who are in full blockade for more than 50 days. We cannot even imagine what their life looks like. So you understand, in the city, there is about 130,000 citizens, they’re still in Mariupol, and they are living in continuous war conditions, shelling, airstrikes."
"Yesterday, Russia started to use very hard bombs. I don’t know what it is, but the sound from them goes for 50 to 60 kilometers around Mariupol. And it makes a lot of damage" he said.
Russia launched a war on Ukraine on February 24. However, according to the latest updates, Russia has given Mariupol a fresh ultimatum to surrender at 2 pm today. In a statement issued early on Wednesday morning, the Russian defence ministry said its forces opened a humanitarian corridor from the Azovstal plant “for the withdrawal of Ukrainian servicemen” to “voluntarily lay down their arms” as well as to evacuate civilians. A commander for the Ukrainian marines fighting in Mariupol said his forces were “maybe facing our last days, if not hours” and appealed for extraction in a video message published to his Facebook account early on Wednesday morning. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said the intensity of fire by Russian troops towards Kharkiv, the Donbas, and Dnipro has “increased significantly”, one day after the Kremlin launched its long-anticipated offensive in eastern Ukraine.