Your Thursday Briefing: Indiscriminate attacks in Mariupol

March 10, 2022

By Melina Delkic

Writer, Briefings

Good morning. We're covering a siege on Mariupol and Yoon Suk-yeol's win in the South Korean election.

A burned vehicle outside the maternity hospital in Mariupol on Wednesday.Evgeniy Maloletka/Associated Press

Mariupol under siege as Russia grows isolated

An apparent Russian strike on a hospital in Mariupol destroyed buildings including a hospital maternity ward, videos verified by The Times show. Here are the latest updates.

Seven days since Russian forces encircled the city, an important port on Ukraine's southern coast, most communications with the outside world are severed and residents don't have electricity or heat.

Russian forces appear to be laying siege to the roughly half a million people living there with overwhelming and indiscriminate firepower, forcing many to live in dire conditions. "There are just bodies lying in the streets," one resident told The Times.

Efforts to negotiate a cease-fire to give civilians a chance to escape have failed repeatedly. For three days, the prospect of relief reaching the city though a "humanitarian corridor" fell apart in a hail of mortar and artillery fire.

Russian economy: The ruble continued its slide on Wednesday amid expanded E.U. sanctions. Russia's central bank is trying to support the ruble with expanded rules preventing exchanges into dollars. Moscow is finding itself in a contest of economic and political endurance against the West, our columnist writes.

World economy: The loss of Russian oil will cause upheaval on the markets not seen in decades.

Chernobyl: Ukrainian officials said Wednesday that damage by Russian forces had left the site of the nuclear disaster dependent on generators. Experts said it was serious, but not a critical situation.

Backlash: More than 13,000 antiwar protesters in Russia have been arrested.

U.S. aid: Lawmakers finalized a $13.6 billion aid package to Ukraine, doubling the White House's initial request.

Other updates:

McDonald's and Starbucks closed all their outlets in Russia.
China is signaling a shift on Ukraine as President Xi Jinping expresses a desire to de-escalate, Nikkei Asia reports.
Russian and Ukrainian officials said they were working on temporary corridors to evacuate six cities, but only one, in Sumy, seemed to be safe.

Yoon Suk-yeol celebrating in front of the People Power Party headquarters in Seoul.Woohae Cho for The New York Times

Yoon is South Korea's next president

After a contentious race, Yoon Suk-yeol of the conservative People Power Party was set to be South Korea's next leader. The governing party's candidate, Lee Jae-myung, conceded in the early hours of the morning. Here are the latest updates.

With more than 98 percent of the votes counted, Yoon was 0.8 percentage points ahead of Lee, the tightest race since South Korea began holding free presidential elections in 1987.

The race between the two men had been so plagued by scandals and mudslinging that it was called a contest between "unlikables." More than three-quarters of South Koreans cast their vote, rivaling voter turnout from the country's last presidential election in 2017.

The election was widely seen as a referendum on President Moon Jae-in, who pushed for engagement with North Korea. Washington and South Korea's neighbors closely watched the election, because Yoon could upend Moon's policy on North Korea.

President-elect: Yoon is an outsider with no political experience who rose to prominence as a prosecutor in both conservative and liberal administrations. His party had been in disarray following the impeachment of its former boss, ex-President Park Geun-hye, who was convicted of corruption. Yoon, an anti-corruption crusader, helped imprison Park.

Foreign policy: Yoon has vowed to align South Korea more closely with its traditional ally, the U.S., and to upend what he called the current government's "partial to China" foreign policy.

Empty shelves and freezers at a supermarket in Hong Kong. Vincent Yu/Associated Press

Hong Kong's outbreak persists

With nearly 600,000 cases recorded so far in Hong Kong's current coronavirus outbreak, officials have been rushing to build temporary isolation facilities and makeshift hospitals with the help of Chinese companies.

Hong Kong authorities have vowed to test all 7.4 million residents. Such an operation would almost certainly require restrictions on people's movements, but the government has been ambiguous on whether a lockdown will happen.

The possibility has set residents scrambling to fill their homes with necessities, and left them wondering: Will we be sent into isolation facilities? Will our children be taken from us if they test positive?

Data: In Hong Kong, the daily fatality rate from the virus is averaging about three deaths per 100,000 residents, which is currently the world's highest, according to New York Times data — largely because many older Hong Kongers are unvaccinated.

Context: Residents have been alarmed by the government's approach to children who test positive, which has included isolating young children from their families. Foreign governments have also responded with concern; the U.S. warned of familial separation during travel.

Here are the latest upda tes and maps of the pandemic.

In other developments:

The tennis player Novak Djokovic was included in the field for this week's Indian Wells tournament in Southern California, despite his unclear vaccination status.
Malaysia will reopen its borders on April 1, after two years of coronavirus restrictions.
Austria is suspending its vaccine mandate.

Continue reading the main story

THE LATEST NEWS

Asia Pacific

Volunteers with an inflatable rescue boat in the Queenscliff suburb of Sydney on Tuesday.Matthew Abbott for The New York Times

In Australia, at least 20 people have died and tens of thousands have been ordered to evacuate as record rainfall continues to inundate the country's eastern coast.
South Korea's military returned a North Korean boat and its crew on Wednesday after they drifted into disputed waters, The A.P. reports.

Around the World

The team used undersea drones to look at the wreck. Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust

A team of adventurers, marine archaeologists and technicians located Ernest Shackleton's ship, the Endurance — one of history's great wrecks — at the bottom of the Weddell Sea in the Antarctic.
Jury selection was set to begin in the fraud trial of Sunny Balwani, the former boyfriend of Elizabeth Holmes, which promises to examine how much he knew about the blood-testing start-up Theranos and Holmes's actions.
President Biden signed an order that would direct the government to come up with a plan to regulate cryptocurrencies.
These maps show how patterns of air pollution across America reflect racist policy from the 1930s.
The first person to have his failing heart replaced with that of a genetically altered pig in a groundbreaking operation died on Tuesday afternoon.

A Morning Read

The owner of the Scheherazade, one of the world's biggest and most expensive superyachts, has not been publicly identified. Bulent Erbas

A 459-foot mystery in a Tuscan port: As the European authorities go after the luxury assets of oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin, a $700 million superyacht cloaked in secrecy has come under investigation.

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ARTS AND IDEAS

Returning the Benin Bronzes

The Smithsonian Institution plans to return most of its collection of 39 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria, a sweeping move that would punctuate a monthslong institutional review of its collection practices.

The name Benin Bronzes encompasses a variety of artifacts including brass plaques, carved elephant tusks and wooden heads. Some were stolen from what is now Nigeria during the British Army's 1897 raid on the ancient kingdom of Benin.

The Smithsonian has legal title to the items, but it plans to give up ownership and ship the pieces to Nigeria at its own expense. Some may remain in or return to Washington on a long-term loan.

"We've long been entirely comfortable that if we had legal title to an object, then certainly we were entitled to keep it and care for it," said Kevin Gover, the under secretary for museums and culture at the Smithsonian. But now, he added, "we're going beyond legal title and asking, Should we own this, knowing the circumstances under which it came into our ownership?"