Ukrainian prosecutor general Iryna Venediktova on Tuesday said evidence shows Russia is committing 'genocide' through its siege on the strategic port city of Mariupol.

Around 200,000 people are currently trapped in Mariupol, encircled and under fire from relentless shelling since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on February 24.

"What now I see in Mariupol it's not about war, it's about genocide," Venediktova told AFP.

"Theatres of war have some rules, some principles. What we see in Mariupol, [are] no rules at all," she added.

Ukraine will work to officially "qualify" the siege as genocide on the international stage, she pledged.

Mariupol -- home to 450,00 before the war began -- has witnessed some of the most vicious violence nationwide.

Artillery has hammered a maternity hospital, flattened residential areas, and struck a theatre despite signs declaring children were sheltering inside.

Incoming humanitarian aid and outgoing evacuation convoys have struggled to penetrate the boundaries of the brutal siege.

"Mariupol residents have described a freezing hellscape riddled with dead bodies and destroyed buildings," a Human Rights Watch official said Monday.

Venediktova said Mariupol is now "a city hostage".

"It's impossible to give them food, water, electricity and [the] Russian Federation exactly knows what they are doing here," she added.

Mariupol is a key asset for Russia which would complete a "land bridge" between the Crimean peninsula annexed in 2014 and the Donbas region occupied by pro-Russia forces.

Seizing the port would also deprive Ukraine of a resupply route with the outside world on its southern Black Sea coast.

French volunteer fighter prepares to battle for Ukraine
Kyiv (AFP) March 21, 2022 - Pierre, 28, says he spent four years as a volunteer fighter in Syria. Now he is preparing to return to a foreign front again, this time in Ukraine.

The construction worker, who declines to give his full name, was at home in France when Russia invaded its neighbour on February 24.

What he saw on his TV screen made him so angry, he says, he decided to set off for Ukraine the very next day.

"I couldn't just sit on my settee and watch what was going on," he tells AFP.

It took him 10 days, by car and train, to reach Ukraine.

At the border, local troops directed him to the Georgian foreign legion, a military unit set up in 2014 by former soldiers from the Caucasus to help Kyiv fight Moscow.

Now Pierre is cooling his heels in Kyiv, waiting to be posted somewhere. It'll probably be near the capital, a city he doesn't know, and which Russian forces are trying to encircle.

He hopes to be deployed "where I'll be most useful -- on the front line" so he can use the skills he picked up in Syria, like "firing 12.7 mms and 14.5 mms (machine guns), Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers".

- 'To the very end' -

Brown-haired, lean, of middling height, Pierre strolls calmly into the discrete park in Kyiv where he has agreed to talk to AFP.

He is dressed in beige sneakers and a military-style khaki sweatshirt, with a khaki scarf hiding half his face.

He is one of a string of foreigners to respond to President Volodymyr Zelensky's appeal for volunteers to come and repel the Russian forces.

The Ukrainian government puts their number at 20,000, though that figure has not been independently verified.

Pierre expects to be in for the long haul.

"I'll stick around right until the end of the war if need be," he says, out of a sense of "commitment" and "solidarity" with Ukrainians who are "fighting for their freedom against the Russian oppressor".

In Syria, Pierre says, he fought other "oppressors" -- Islamic State (IS) group jihadists and Turkish forces battling the Syrian Kurds.

Between 2014 and 2010, Pierre says he spent a total of four years fighting in Syria, in three separate stints.

He reels off the names of northern Syria's ferocious battles -- "Manbij, Raqa, Deir Ezzor" -- and says he came close to death there on more than one occasion.

Raqa, former "capital" of the IS group's self-declared caliphate, was the worst, he recalls.

When Kurdish forces backed by NATO air power retook Raqa in 2017, the retreating IS fighters mined entire neighbourhoods.

Pierre says he and his unit were searching a building when one of his comrades stepped on a mine hidden under debris in a staircase.

Pierre was in a sheltered corner of the stairwell and escaped unharmed. But he saw four men die in front of his eyes.

"It shakes you up a bit," he acknowledges.

- 'A political football' -

According to one inside source, the Georgian foreign legion in Ukraine comprises between several dozen and several hundred foreign fighters.

As in Syria, Pierre says volunteers combatants are joining from all over -- "Italians, Germans, Norwegians, Spaniards, people from pretty much everywhere in Europe. Even from India."

Pierre admires the Ukrainians for their courage and unity.

"Every single civilian is prepared to fight," he says, forgetting that in Kyiv alone, half the city's population is estimated to have left since the start of the invasion.

He sees Ukraine as "a political football" in a high-stakes game between Russia and the United States.

"At the end, it's the Ukrainians who end up in the shit," he says contemptuously.

"When all hell lets loose, there's no-one there to help them. Other countries just fall over themselves to send in weapons."

He says France is just as "hypocritical" as the other European nations, making outraged noises but "letting massacres happen" in Ukraine, just like in "Kurdistan, Yemen and Myanmar".

When he was younger, Pierre wanted to join the French army. But he "did a few stupid things", he explains without going into details, and that was no longer an option.

He knows his long stints in Syria look suspicious to the French authorities and they won't help prise open any barracks gates on his behalf.

But now he says he is grateful he was prevented from going into the forces. "It's better to go to Kurdistan or here (in Ukraine) on your own than play the politicians' hypocritical game."

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Biden says Putin considering using chemical, biological weapons in Ukraine
Washington (AFP) March 22, 2022
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