LVIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian fighters battling Russian forces in tunnels beneath Mariupol’s sprawling steel plant have refused to give up in the face of relentless attacks, with one commander’s wife saying they have vowed to “resist until final”.
The fighting in the last Ukrainian stronghold of the strategic port city reduced to ruins by the Russian onslaught he seemed increasingly desperate amid mounting speculation that President Vladimir Putin wants to present the Russian people with triumph on the battlefield, or announce an escalation of the war, in time for Victory Day on Monday.
“They will not give up,” Kateryna Prokopenko said Thursday after speaking on the phone with her husband, a leader of the steel plant advocates. “They’re just waiting for a miracle.”
She said her husband, Azov Regiment Commander Denys Prokopenko, told her he would love her forever. “I’m going crazy over this. They seemed like parting words,” she said.
The General Staff of the Ukrainian army said on Friday that “the blockade of the units of the defense forces in the Azovstal area continues” and that the Russians, with the support of aviation, had resumed assault operations to take control. of the expanding plant.
Monday’s Victory Day is the most important patriotic holiday on the Russian calendar and marks the triumph of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany. But as long as the Ukrainians resist taking over the plant, “Russian losses will continue to mount and frustrate their operational plans in southern Donbas,” the British Defense Ministry said in an assessment.
Some 2,000 Ukrainian fighters, according to the latest Russian estimate, were holed up in a maze of tunnels and bunkers below the Azovstal steel mill. A few hundred civilians were also believed to be trapped there.
“There are many (combatants) wounded, but they are not giving up,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his late-night video address. “They are holding their positions.”
“Imagine this hell! And there are children there,” she said. “Over two months of constant bombing, bombing, constant killing.”
The Russians managed to enter the plant on Wednesday with the help of an electrician who knew the design, said Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry.
“He showed them the underground tunnels that lead to the factory,” Gerashchenko said in a video.
Zelenskyy said the attack was preventing the evacuation of remaining civilians, even as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said another attempt was underway. “We must continue to do everything we can to get people out of these hells,” Guterres said.
The Kremlin denied that its troops were storming the plant and demanded the surrender of the Ukrainians. They have refused. Russia also accused the fighters of preventing civilians from leaving.
The fall of Mariupol would deprive Ukraine of a vital port, allow Russia to establish a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014, and free up troops to fight in other parts of Donbas, the eastern industrial region that the The Kremlin says that is now its main target.
Captain Sviatoslav Palamar, deputy commander of the Azov Regiment, called on Ukrainian television for the evacuation of civilians and wounded fighters from the steelworks, saying soldiers were “dying in agony from lack of proper treatment.”
More than 100 civilians were rescued from the steel mill over the weekend. But many previous attempts to open safe corridors from Mariupol failed, with Ukraine blaming the Russians for the bombing and shooting.
Meanwhile, 10 weeks into the devastating war, Ukraine’s military claimed it had recaptured some areas in the south and repelled other attacks in the east, further thwarting Putin’s ambitions after his failed attempt to seize kyiv. Ukrainian and Russian forces are fighting village by village.
The General Staff in kyiv said Russian forces were conducting surveillance flights, and in the worst-hit areas of Donetsk and Luhansk, Ukrainian forces repulsed 11 attacks and destroyed tanks and armored vehicles. Russia did not immediately acknowledge those losses.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Russian forces are making only “heavy” progress in the Donbas.
There are growing suggestions that Ukraine could try to broaden its push to seize more territory from Russia outside of Kharkiv, its second-largest city.
Ukrainian defense chief Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi said Thursday that a counteroffensive could begin to drive Russian forces away from Kharkiv and Izyum, which has been a key node in Russia’s control of the eastern cauldron. In recent days, Ukraine has pushed Russian troops some 40 kilometers (25 miles) east of Kharkiv, which has come under repeated Russian bombardment.
Additional Ukrainian advances may save the city from artillery attacks, as well as force Moscow to divert troops from other areas of the front line.
On Thursday, a US official said the United States shared intelligence with Ukraine about the location of a Russian flagship. before the mid-April attack that sank it, one of Moscow’s highest-profile failures of the war.
The United States has provided “a range of intelligence” including locations of warships, said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. The official said the decision to target the Moskva missile cruiser was purely a Ukrainian decision.
Fearful of further attacks around Victory Day, the mayor of the western Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk urged residents to go out into the countryside over the long weekend and warned them not to gather in public places.
And the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia, a key transit point for evacuees from Mariupol, announced a curfew from Sunday night to Tuesday morning.
Mariupol, which before the war had a population of over 400,000, has come to symbolize the misery inflicted by war.. The siege of the city has left some 100,000 civilians trapped with little food, water, medicine or heating.
As the battle there raged, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov said Russian shelling on Thursday hit dozens of Ukrainian military targets, including eastern troop concentrations, an artillery battery near the eastern settlement of Zarozhne and rocket launchers near the southern city. of Mykolayiv.
The war has devastated Ukraine’s medical infrastructure, Zelenskyy said in a video link to a UK charity event. Nearly 400 health care facilities have been damaged or destroyed, he said.
“There is simply a catastrophic situation regarding access to medical services and medicine” in the areas occupied by Russian forces, he said. “Even the simplest drugs are missing.”
With the challenge of post-war mine clearance and reconstruction in mind, Zelenskyy announced the launch of a global fundraising platform called United24.
At the same time, Poland hosted an international donor conference that raised $6.5 billion in humanitarian aid. The meeting was attended by prime ministers and ambassadors from many European countries, as well as representatives from other nations and some companies.
In addition, a Ukrainian cabinet body began developing proposals for a comprehensive post-war reconstruction plan, while Zelenskyy also urged Western allies to come up with a program similar to the post-World War II Marshall Plan to help Ukraine rebuild.
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Anna reported from Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine. Associated Press writers Yesica Fisch in Zaporizhzhia, Inna Varenytsia and David Keyton in Kyiv, Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Mstyslav Chernov in Kharkiv, Lolita C. Baldor in Washington, and AP staff around the world contributed to this report.
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