Mariupol says thousands deported from besieged Ukrainian city

Over the past week, several thousand Mariupol residents were deported onto the Russian territory

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russia's siege of the port city of Mariupol was "a terror that will be remembered for centuries to come", while local authorities said thousands of residents there had been taken by force across the border.

"Over the past week, several thousand Mariupol residents were deported onto the Russian territory," the city council said in a statement on its Telegram channel late on Saturday, Qazet.az reports.

Russian news agencies have said buses have carried several hundred people Moscow calls refugees from Mariupol to Russia in recent days.

Many of Mariupol's 400,000 residents have been trapped for more than two weeks as Russia seeks to take control of the city, which would help secure a land corridor to the Crimea peninsula that Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

President Vladimir Putin calls the assault on Ukraine, which began on Feb. 24, a "special operation" to demilitarise the country and root out people he terms dangerous nationalists. Western nations call it an aggressive war of choice and have imposed punishing sanctions aimed at crippling Russia's economy.