Thread by @Telegraph

🇺🇦Mariupol has refused to wave the white flag.

In a demonstration of astonishing, collective courage, on Monday the besieged city declined to surrender and lay down its arms.

@rmendick and @benfarmerDT report🧵👇
telegraph.co.uk/world-news/202…

🔴For almost a month, the port - its remaining 300,000 population now trapped - has been on the receiving end of a “hellish” Russian bombardment...

...that has flattened much of it and left its remaining residents without water, food and power

The last diplomat to leave said Mariupol could now be added to an unwanted list of cities “destroyed by war” that includes Guernica, Stalingrad and Grozny

The Kremlin had issued Ukraine’s leaders a deadline of 5am Moscow time to respond to its ultimatum to give in or suffer the consequences.

➡️Before the deadline had even passed, Mariupol had turned down the offer, showing heroic defiance in the face of the onslaught

🗣️“There can be no talk of any surrender, laying down of arms,” Irina Vereshchuk, the Ukrainian deputy prime minister, told the news outlet Ukrainian Pravda.

“We have already informed the Russian side about this”

A plan to evacuate 350 children from orphanages in Mariupol to dormitories and boarding schools in safer areas of Ukraine had been rejected by Moscow.

💬Ms Vereshchuk said that instead the enemy’s troops were “abducting” the city’s children and “deporting” them to Russia

🗣️“We ask clearly to give us a corridor and we tell them which boarding school we are going to, and why,” said Ms Vereshchuk.

"Then they’re immediately taking those children to Russia. This is terrorism”

Ukraine has claimed that as much as 90% of the buildings in Mariupol have been either damaged or destroyed, almost no edifice untouched.

Read the full story 👇
telegraph.co.uk/world-news/202…