Russia-Ukraine updates: US sanctions Russian military shipbuilder, diamond miner

Pope Francis made a strong anti-war statement Monday as the Russian invasion of Ukraine entered its 26th day.

In a speech in a private meeting at the Vatican with volunteer members of the I Was Thirsty organization, which promotes clean drinking water to poor areas of the world, the pope decried war and the money spent on weapons.

"Why make war on each other for conflicts that we should resolve by talking to each other as men?" he said to the audience in the Clementine Hall.

"Why not rather unite our forces and our resources to fight together the true battles of civilization: the fight against hunger and thirst; the fight against disease and epidemics; the fight against epidemics; the fight against the poverty and slavery of today?" the pope continued. "We must create the consciousness that continuing to spend on weapons dirties the soul, it dirties the heart, it dirties humanity."

It comes just one day after Pope Francis denounced the “repugnant" war against Ukraine as “cruel and sacrilegious inhumanity" during a noontime prayer in St. Peter's Square, although he stopped short of naming Russia as the aggressor.

-ABC News’ Phoebe Natanson

An ammonia leak has been reported at a chemical plant in the northeastern city of Sumy, the regional governor Dmytro Zhyvytskyy said Monday.

On his official Telegram channel, Zhyvytskyy said the leak was caused by Russian shelling.

He warned those within a 3-mile radius of the Sumykhimprom plant should leave the area because the gas is hazardous but that workers have contained the leak.

Zhyvytskyy said, so far, just one injury has been reported among employees of the plant.

-ABC News’ Joseph Simonetti

More than 3.4 million people have fled Ukraine since Russia invaded, according to the latest figures from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Monday's update showed that, of those refugees, more than 2 million have crossed the border into Poland. Additionally, about 535,000 have entered Romania and 365,000 have crossed into Moldova.

Refugees are also going to Hungary, Slovakia, Russia and Belarus.

UNHCR chief Filippo Grandi tweeted Sunday that since the Russian invasion, 10 million people in Ukraine fled, either displaced in the country or as refugees abroad.

"Among the responsibilities of those who wage war, everywhere in the world, is the suffering inflicted on civilians who are forced to flee their homes," he wrote.

UNICEF told ABC News that half of the internally displaced Ukrainians and half of those who have fled are children.

-ABC News' Zoe Magee

Ukrainian officials rejected Russia’s demand that they surrender the southern port city of Mariupol on Monday morning.

“There can be no talk of any surrender, laying down of arms," Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk said, according to The Associated Press.

Officials instead called on Russia to allow residents to evacuate safely from the city.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an early morning video address said his government was preparing to send buses to Mariupol on Monday to continue the evacuation.

“In besieged Mariupol, Russian aircraft dropped a bomb on an art school. People were hiding there. Hiding from shelling, from bombing,” Zelenskyy said, according to an official translation from his office. “There were no military positions. There were about four hundred civilians. Mostly women and children, the elderly. They are under the debris. We do not know how many are alive at the moment.”

Some who’ve left Mariupol have described dire circumstances, with constant shelling and little access to essentials, including food, water, and medicine, according to a report published Monday by Human Rights Watch.

“Mariupol residents have described a freezing hellscape riddled with dead bodies and destroyed buildings,” Belkis Wille, senior crisis and conflict researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “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.”