(12 Mar 2022) Russian tanks fired on at least one apartment building in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol on Friday, sparking fires and sending thick, dark smoke rising into the sky.
It wasn't possible to tell whether they'd first received fire from the targeted locations.
The encircled city of 446,000 people has suffered some of the greatest misery from Russia's war in Ukraine.
Unceasing barrages have thwarted repeated attempts to bring in food and water, evacuate trapped civilians and to bury all of the dead.
Video showed tanks - believed to have later been destroyed by Ukrainian defenders - shooting at a residential building, and explosions followed by deep, loud booms as the flats were hit.
The atmosphere on the streets was tense as rescue workers and soldiers operated with the sound of firing nearby.
In a local hospital, conditions were deteriorating, with electricity reserved for operating tables.
Doctors operated on a woman with several injuries, including in her throat, and removed bloodied shrapnel.
She shrieked in pain as they plugged a wound in her arm.
Meanwhile, people with nowhere else to go lined the hallways.
Among them was Anastasiya Erashova, who wept and trembled as she held a sleeping child.
Shelling had just killed her other child as well as her brother’s child, Erashova said, her scalp crusted with blood.
She said she'd been at her brother's house, underground with women and children, when a mortar struck her building and they became trapped.
"I don't know where to run to," Erashova said, unable to hold back tears. "Who will bring our children back, who?"
Ukraine’s military said Saturday that Russian forces had captured Mariupol's eastern outskirts, tightening the armed squeeze on the strategic port.
Also Saturday, the government said Russian forces had shelled a city-center mosque sheltering more than 80 people in the city, including children. There was no immediate word of casualties.
Taking Mariupol and other ports on the Azov Sea could allow Russia to establish a land corridor to Crimea, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014.

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