Authorities in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol say they fear that up to 300 people were killed in the 16 March bombing of a theater. Citing the accounts of those who were there at the time of the blast, Mariupol City Council made the claim on Friday morning. "Unfortunately, we start this day with bad news," the council said on its Telegram channel. "From eyewitnesses, information appeared that about 300 people died in the drama theatre of Mariupol as a result of a bombardment by a Russian aircraft. "Until the last, I do not want to believe in this horror. Until the last, I want to believe that everyone managed to escape. "But the words of those who were inside the building at the time of this terrorist act say otherwise." Other developments on the ground in Ukraine: A military chaplain was killed by Ukrainian "Smertch" rocket fire on a Russian border village not far from the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv in heavy fighting, the Orthodox Church said on Friday. Civilians are starving in Mariupol, the city council said in a statement on Telegram, emphasising that "more and more people are left without any food supplies" in the port city that has been under siege since early March. Ukrainian forces are striking "high-value targets in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine" including a landing ship, the UK Ministry of Defence has said. The UK added on Friday that Ukraine has re-occupied towns up to 35 kilometres east of Kyiv. Ukraine's armed forces said in a statement that a large Russian landing ship was destroyed during an attack on the Berdyansk port. Large landing ships "Caesar Kunikov" and "Novocherkassk" were damaged, they added. Russia claimed on Friday that it had destroyed the Ukrainian army's largest fuel reserve near Kyiv with cruise missiles the day before. Russia is running out of precision-guided munitions, a senior Pentagon official said, according to Reuters. Russians and Ukrainians exchanged prisoners on Thursday, according to the Ukrainian deputy prime minister and the Russian human rights delegate. At least 135 children have died in the war in Ukraine, according to Ukraine's human rights commissioner Lyudmyla Denisova. What is happening in the EU and the West? The EU and US agreed on a partnership to reduce European reliance on Russian natural gas. Ukraine on Friday asked the European Union to close its borders with Russia and Belarus, a country allied with Moscow in the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army for a month. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy criticised European Union leaders, saying that sanctions and support for Ukraine came "a little late". US President Joe Biden travelled to Poland on Friday close to the border with Ukraine as the country hosts more than two million refugees. What is the latest that Western leaders saying about the conflict? US President Joe Biden said he wanted Russia out of the G20, and that a Russian chemical weapons attack in Ukraine would "trigger a response in kind". UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the BBC he wasn't sure that Vladimir Putin wanted peace and said the Russian president was trying to "Grozynyfy" Ukrainian cities, referring to the Chechen city of Grozny. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz says the world is united in its response to the Russian attack on Ukraine last month and said that sanctions against Russia were proving to be powerful. In the month since the war began, more than 3.6 million people have fled the war in Ukraine. Most of them have fled to neighbouring Poland, which has taken in over two million refugees. Millions of Ukrainians are also internally displaced within the country as heavy fighting and shelling forces people to flee several cities. More than half of Ukraine's child population is displaced, according to the UN Children's Fund, UNICEF, which called it a "grim milestone". — Euronews
