US president Joe Biden came up-close to the war in Ukraine Friday as Russia appeared to row back on its vaulting ambitions, after a month of dogged resistance by Ukrainian forces backed by ever-rising Western support.
Biden visited Poland after forging a new set of measures with the EU designed to lessen Europe's dependence on energy imports from Russia's sanctions-hit economy.
His visit near the border came as a clearer scale of the ruin emerged from Ukraine's besieged port city of Mariupol, which a month into the invasion resembles World War II scenes of Russian cities razed by the Nazis.
Authorities fear some 300 civilians may have died in a Russian air strike on a theatre-turned-bomb shelter in Mariupol last week, in what would be the invasion's single bloodiest attack.
"I have escaped, but I have lost all my family. I have lost my house. I am desperate," Oksana Vynokurova, 33, told AFP after finally escaping Mariupol by train to the western city of Lviv.
"My mum is dead. I left my mother in the yard like a dog, because everybody's shooting," she said.
Also disembarking from the train, Svetlana Kuznetsova said: "There is no water, light and electricity. We were living in cellars. We were cooking food on fires.
"I have never seen such horror. There is no Mariupol," the middle-aged woman added. "Mariupol is like Grozny (in Chechnya). Everything is destroyed."-AFP
