russian population. reporter: the surviving sailors were brought to crimea where civilians laid flowers and wreaths and admission of there were indeed losses despite russia s claim that everyone got off the ship. there will be victories and losses. reporter: the initial line was there were no ukrainian attack but instead there was a fire on board which caused the explosion. it is a humiliatiing loss for russia but a devastating ones for the parents of the sailors killed. the father of a young conscript writing on social media, a tragedy occurred, the truth about which we have not yet found out. the story they are getting a lie, dmitry shkrebets writes.
what they believe they will gain, but they are going to be gaining a pyrrhic victory, and they will have empty buildings, and a land bridge they are hoping to get, but it is not a land bridge to use between crimea and the donbas. i wanted to ask you about the weapons that the united states is sending in. and the sources are saying that the u.s. is not able to track the weapons going to ukraine, and there are not boots on the ground to follow them through, and one person briefed said it is like this. it drop into black hole, and you have no sense of it after a short period of time once it crosses into the border, and they call it a risk that they willing to take right now, but how big of a risk? it is a potential huge risk, because they should have a tagging and tracking system like
this city stands between those two places. so if russia wanted to build a land bridge connecting the separatist pocket and connecting crimea, which is now returned to russia and says it will never, ever relinquish, it would have to go through this kind of territory. so people here are starting to get nervous. there s no panic, but i was at a woman s house earlier today and she was showing me her go bag. she s put on her key documents, money in a top drawer so she could grab it. she started to do more exercise because she knows that she may have to physically grab her children. she has a 6-month-old, a-year-old boy and a two and a half-year-old boy, one under each arm and run down the stairs and go somewhere so she said she s doing more physical exercise, signing up for the territorial defense services here so she could volunteer in
literally starving. this is a siege, that s what the russians are doing here. again, how long they can hold out, and that s very important. once, if they do surrender these forces will be free to go back up. if you want to go back to the ukraine map overall, that will free forces to go up this way. eventually you can surround a lot of ukrainian forces in here. the significance of having this part right here, which is what we re talking about. here is mariupol and crimea. connecting crimea which they seized in 2014 with the donbas, they can consolidate forces and go that way? it s that on the battlefield now. it s also you have a line of communication between russia and crimea that doesn t require the bridge here. let s go back to the corridor here. this is what they had previously, all they had was this teeny little bridge which you can t get everything you need if you re in the russian military across this bridge. it s just not big enough.
although the fighting and the shelling has been getting closer and more intense. look at these pictures from the edge of the city, this family s home was hit close to one of the airports where there s been heavy fighting all week, they say a rocket or something like that hit their children s bedroom. just minutes after the children had left the house. a lucky escape for that family, but you can see the pain that this war is causing people across the country. there are other cities effectively surrounded and being cut off. mariupol is the biggest of those, one of the ports. power and water supplies have been cut off it s effectively under siege. and this footage has been verified by the bbc this morning, showing a helicppter attack on the city. it s a strategic important city, connecting crimea with the rest of ukraine. if russia can control that city,