Russia-Ukraine live updates: Ukraine rejects call to surrender Mariupol; 8 killed in Kyiv mall strike

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine more than three weeks ago was met with outrage and sanctions in the West. As the fighting continues and threatens to turn into a stalemate, emotions are being channeled into street art across European nations.

From London to Vienna, the photos below show a sampling of the graffiti about the war in Ukraine adorning the walls of European cities. Many target Russian President Vladimir Putin himself.

U.S. stock markets edged lower at the opening bell Monday, threatening their recent rally as the war in Ukraine continued to dominate investors’ attention.

The S&P 500 index moved 0.4 percent lower while the Dow Jones industrial average and tech-heavy Nasdaq were nearly flat.

Last week, the three major U.S. indexes notched their best weekly performance since November 2020, boosted as oil prices slid down from record highs. But prices have been pushed back above $110 a barrel as bombardments intensify and resolution of the conflict seems out of reach. Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, was trading more than 4.3 percent higher Monday, above $112.50 a barrel.

Meanwhile, Moscow’s MOEX exchange partially reopened for the first time in three weeks, after equities endured the most brutal sell-off in market history in the swift economic backlash from the invasion of Ukraine.

The Bank of Russia said Monday that federal loan bonds would resume trading, days after the government made a $117 million interest payment to foreign bondholders, averting what would have been its first foreign debt default since 1918. Other trading remains suspended, as the government seeks to shield stocks from the pain that Russian-listed firms outside the country have felt in recent weeks amid the cavalcade of sanctions.

Two Associated Press journalists, Mstyslav Chernov and Evgeniy Maloletka, who for weeks have documented in excruciating detail the material and human destruction brought about by Russian airstrikes in Mariupol in southeast Ukraine, have left the city.

“We were the last journalists in Mariupol. Now there are none,” Chernov told Paris-based AP correspondent Lori Hinnant, who in a story published Monday recounts the pair’s journey out of Mariupol and increasingly precarious efforts to get information about what was going on in the city to the outside world.

For weeks, Mariupol, in southeast Ukraine, was blockaded by Russian armed forces that covet the strategically-located port. The city was mostly cut off from sources of water, food, medicine and electricity; it had limited Internet service and phone signal. Ukrainian authorities accused Russia of bombing civilian targets there, including a maternity hospital, a theater and an art school. Chernov and Maloletka, who are from eastern Ukraine, were among the only journalists able to cover events on the ground.

The photos and videos they took in the aftermath of the hospital strike showed injured pregnant women walking and being carried out of the hospital. The pair later tracked down the women they photographed and found that one woman had died of her injuries, along with her baby.

Now, the battle for Mariupol has evolved into street-to-street guerrilla fighting with Russian troops, according to Ukrainian military and city officials. Moscow has issued an ultimatum to Ukrainian forces — surrender and leave the city, or face a “military tribunal.” So far, Ukraine has rejected this proposal.

Loveday Morris contributed to this report.

War has damaged more than 450 schools and dozens of hospitals in Ukraine as 1.5 million children fled the country, according to a nongovernmental organization dedicated to protecting children.

Aid workers fear things will get worse for the millions still trapped in a war zone.

“The streets of Ukraine are being used as a battlefield,” Pete Walsh, Save the Children’s Country Director in Ukraine, said Monday in a statement. “ … We must protect the children in Ukraine at all costs. How many more lives need to be lost until this war ends?”

At least 59 children have been killed in nearly a month since Russian military forces invaded Ukraine, although media reports suggest that number could be as high as 100, the organization said.

Nearly 6 million children are still in the country, and Save the Children believes many of them are sheltering inside buildings that are being attacked. Such shelling and bombing could hurt or kill them , or destroy the facilities that give them access to food, clean water and health care.

The organization urged fighters to “uphold and protect the civilian nature of schools” by not using them for military purposes, exposing them to attack. “The rules of war are very clear: children are not a target, and neither are hospitals or schools,” Walsh said in the statement.

The World Health Organization has verified at least 52 “attacks on health care” — including assaults on patients, health-care workers, facilities or infrastructure — since the start of the war on Feb. 24, according to data on the agency’s website. That’s more than half of such attacks worldwide the organization has documented this year.

On Monday, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said two schools and two kindergartens in the Podilskyi district were damaged the night before in a Russian airstrike in which a mall was destroyed and eight people were killed.

Hundreds of the country’s healthcare facilities are in danger. More than 300 remain in combat zones or areas controlled by Russian troops, The Washington Post reported. Another 600 facilities are within some six miles of hostilities.

“Hospitals and medical facilities are protected by international humanitarian law,” a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, Jason Straziuso, told The Post in an email.

Maite Fernández Simon, Annabelle Timsit and Andrew Jeong contributed to this report.

Jerusalem — Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said Monday that Israel will continue to maintain ties with both Kyiv and Moscow as it works “to try to bring an end to the war” and rejected a comparison made by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky likening Russia’s invasion of his country to the Nazi campaign to subjugate Europe in World War II.

“I personally think that the Holocaust should not be compared to anything,” Bennett said. He called it a “unique event” in history. Zelensky is Jewish and lost family during the war.

Bennett’s predecessor, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, frequently invoked the Holocaust when defending Israeli positions, such as opposition to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

Bennett’s remarks followed Zelensky’s virtual address to Israel’s parliament Sunday, in which he urged the country to do more to help Ukraine defend itself against the Russian invasion.

“We ask why we’re not receiving weapons from you, why you haven’t applied sanctions on Russia, and on Russian businesses,” Zelensky said in his Sunday address. “You will need to give answers, and to be able to live with those answers.”

Bennett, speaking the next day at a conference organized by the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, told Israelis they should be “proud” of the humanitarian aid the country has so far provided.

Bennett said while some advances had been made in talks between Moscow and Kyiv, “very large” gaps remained.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has falsely claimed that he invaded Ukraine to “denazify” Ukraine’s government. The rhetoric resonates domestically in Russia, where over the years Ukrainian nationalism has become equated with neo-Nazis.

The Israeli government is wary of upsetting its unofficial coordination with Russia that enables it to strike targets in Syria. Israel had rejected Ukraine’s requests for military equipment, and instead has sent medical and humanitarian aid.

An Israeli aid hospital in Western Ukraine near the border with Poland is set to open Tuesday. The government has also loosened some immigration rules to allow non-Jewish Ukrainians fleeing the war to temporarily settle with family in Israel.

The European Union’s top diplomat accused Russia of committing “a massive war crime” in its assault on the Ukrainian city of Mariupol as residents who fled a bitter siege recalled spending days in basements hiding from the bombs.

In a report published Monday, Human Rights Watch said the International Criminal Court, the United Nations and other jurisdictions “should investigate potential war crimes in Mariupol.”

The U.S.-based rights group said that in interviews with 32 people who managed to escape the port city, many described seeing dead bodies strewn on the roads when they went outside in search of food, water or a phone signal. With the disruptions to phone lines, they could not talk to relatives, find out what was happening in the city or understand whether they could safely evacuate.

“Mariupol residents have described a freezing hellscape riddled with dead bodies and destroyed buildings,” said Belkis Wille, a HRW senior crisis and conflict researcher. “And these are the lucky ones who were able to escape, leaving behind thousands who are cut off from the world in the besieged city.”

Evacuees who fled the city in a convoy in recent days drove through the front lines with windshields smashed, vehicles marked with white flags and signs reading “children.” They recounted struggling to survive in basements with little to no food, electricity or water.