Plus a plane crash in China and Hong Kong’s easing of Covid restrictions.
Good morning. We’re covering the ongoing destruction of Mariupol, Ukraine, the search for survivors in a Chinese plane crash and lifting of Covid restrictions in Hong Kong. Ukraine rejected Russia’s demand that soldiers defending Mariupol surrender at dawn on Monday. Efforts to reach hundreds of thousands of people trapped there remained fraught with danger as Russian forces escalated attacks. “My city is dying a painful death,” one survivor wrote after she escaped. “For twenty days I was dying with it. I was in hell.” A powerful blast also rocked Kyiv on Monday and reduced a sprawling shopping mall to rubble. A Times reporter saw six dead bodies there covered in plastic, as rescue workers battled fires and pulled more victims from the wreckage. Here are live updates. Context: After nearly a month of fighting, the war has reached a stalemate. Russia is turning to deadlier and blunter methods, including targeting civilians, as it suffers troop and equipment losses that would limit its ability to mount offensives. Resistance: About two million people who remain in Kyiv are galvanized by a newfound unity. In the ancient city of Lviv, simple rituals have taken on a new and sometimes surreal meaning. Diplomacy: The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is drawing on other nations’ histories of struggle to rally support, invoking the civil rights movement to U.S. lawmakers and the fall of the Berlin Wall to Germans. Our chief fashion critic also analyzed his most famous garment: the olive green T-shirt. Other updates: A passenger plane with 132 people on board crashed on Monday afternoon in the Guangxi region, a mountainous area of southern China. It was unclear if any of the crew members and passengers survived.
