Russia fires hypersonic missile as ‘destroyed’ Mariupol pleads for help amid fighting on streets

Russia claims it fired a hypersonic missile for the first time in the Ukraine war on Saturday as its forces pushed deeper into Mariupol where local police said the city had been "wiped off the face of the earth”.

Moscow’s defence ministry said the “unstoppable” Kinzhal – or ‘dagger’ – weapon targeted  a weapons warehouse used by Ukrainian troops, although the claim could not be verified.

Vladimir Putin has claimed his country is the global leader in hypersonic missiles, whose speed, manoeuvrability and altitude make them difficult to track and intercept.

It was unclear if the strikes caused any casualties, but local officials said a separate attack on a Ukrainian barracks in Mykolaiv had killed dozens of soldiers. Dozens of survivors were being pulled from the rubble after Friday’s attack, which happened as soldiers slept.

In Mariupol, where about 300,000 people are trapped by Russian forces, fresh aerial images emerged of the bombed drama theatre in which hundreds of civilians were reportedly hiding in a basement.

The death toll remains unclear in the attack, which Ukraine’s foreign minister last night described as an “inhuman Russian war crime”.

The city’s mayor said there was fighting in the streets and Russian tanks.

A police officer in the city pleaded with western nations to provide his country with greater protection from the air.

In a video post from a rubble-strewn street, Mariupol police officer Michail Vershnin told President Joe Biden and French president Emmanuel Macron that they had promised assistance, "but what we have received is not quite it", and urged them to save the civilian population.

"Children, elderly people are dying. The city is destroyed and it has been wiped off the face of the earth," he said in the video.

"You have promised that there will be help, give us that help. Biden, Macron, you are great leaders. Be them to the end.”

Mr Vershnin said the city is facing the fate of the Syrian city of Aleppo that was destroyed in 2016 in a Russian-backed siege during Syria’s revolution-turned-civil war. Russia helped Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s government with a ruthless strategy by locking sieges around opposition-held areas, bombarding and starving them until the population’s ability to hold out collapsed.

Russian forces have already cut the city off from the Sea of Azov, and its fall would link Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, to territories controlled by Moscow-backed separatists in the east.

Ukrainian and Russian forces battled over the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, Vadym Denysenko, adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, said on Saturday. "One of the largest metallurgical plants in Europe is actually being destroyed," he said.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky called for comprehensive peace talks with Moscow and also urged Switzerland to do more to crack down on Russian oligarchs who he said were helping wage war on his country with their money.

Mr Zelensky told an anti-war protest in Bern via an audio link that Swiss banks were where the "money of the people who unleashed this war" lay and their accounts should be frozen.

Ukrainian cities "are being destroyed on the orders of people who live in European, in beautiful Swiss towns, who enjoy property in your cities. It would really be good to strip them of this privilege," he said.

In Kyiv, police said seven were killed and five more wounded in a fresh mortar attack on the nearby town of Makariv.

Ukraine’s National Police said on Telegram that Russia had fired at eight cities and villages in eastern Donetsk, killing or wounding dozens of civilians.

A total of 6,623 people were evacuated from Ukrainian cities through humanitarian corridors on Saturday, a senior official said, considerably fewer than Friday.

Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report