Regions under fire: what was reported on 19 March 2022
Reports from Ivano-Frankivsk, Mariupol, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv and Rubizhne show how widely the war reached across Ukraine in mid-March 2022.
What did the war look like from Ukraine's regions on 19 March 2022? Reports from that day and the days just before it pointed to fighting and shelling far beyond a single front.
West: a new weapon claimed
Russia said it had used the Kh-47M2 Kinzhal hypersonic missile in Ukraine for the first time, on Friday 18 March, to destroy a weapons storage facility in the Ivano-Frankivsk region.
South and south-east: Mykolaiv, Zaporizhzhia, Mariupol
On 18 March, a Russian missile strike destroyed a Ukrainian military barracks in Mykolaiv. At least 50 soldiers were killed, and many more were believed to be buried under rubble.
The same day, nine people died when Russian shelling hit Zaporizhzhia.
In besieged Mariupol, the city council said that some captured residents were being taken to camps and redirected to remote Russian cities. Russia denied the accusations.
East: Rubizhne
A few days earlier, on 17 March, Russian-backed militants of the so-called Luhansk People's Republic took control of government buildings in the city of Rubizhne.
Taken together, the reports from 17 to 19 March 2022 covered a missile strike in the west, deadly attacks in the south and south-east, allegations about the treatment of Mariupol residents, and a change of control over administrative buildings in the east.
