What happened in Mariupol and Kharkiv region on 9 March 2022?
A retrospective on the Mariupol hospital strike and Ukraine's reported gains near Kharkiv, set against the shelling of the days before.
What did the war look like in Ukraine's regions on 9 March 2022? In Mariupol, a Russian airstrike destroyed a maternity ward and a children's hospital, killing three people and injuring at least 17. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that many people were unaccounted for.
The strike came during the siege of Mariupol, which was part of the wider eastern Ukraine offensive.
Kharkiv Oblast
The same day, Ukrainian forces announced that they had regained control of Derhachi, a city in the Kharkiv Raion district of Kharkiv Oblast. The announcement came during the battle of Kharkiv, which had already brought heavy damage in the preceding days.
On 8 March 2022, Russian shelling destroyed the Albanian consulate in Kharkiv. No casualties were reported. On 7 March 2022, the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology, which holds a neutron generator, had been destroyed by Russian shelling. The agency said that no radiation release had been detected from the facility, which housed a small inventory of radioactive material.
Also on 7 March 2022, Ukraine said that it had killed Vitaly Gerasimov, a general of the 41st Combined Arms Army, in Kharkiv Oblast. He was described as the second general killed by Ukrainian forces, after Andrey Sukhovetsky.
Other fronts and diplomacy
On 7 March 2022, in the Kherson offensive, Ukrainian Navy forces struck the Russian Navy patrol boat Vasily Bykov with missiles in the Black Sea.
On 8 March 2022, in an interview with ABC News, Mr Zelenskyy said that Ukraine was open to discussions about the Donetsk and Luhansk separatist regions, which Russia had recognised. He also conceded that his country might no longer be prepared to be accepted into NATO.
Taken together, the reports from 7 to 9 March 2022 show a war fought across several regions at once: civilian sites hit in Mariupol, shelling and counter-attacks around Kharkiv, and naval action off the southern coast, alongside public signals from the president on the terms of possible talks.
