Dozens of Ukrainians were feared dead on Sunday after a Russian bomb brought down a school where some 90 people were sheltering in the basement, while Ukrainian fighters held out inside the Mariupol steel plant as Moscow forces apparently raced to capture the city before Russia. victory day holiday.
Emergency crews found two bodies and rescued 30 people at the school in the town of Bilohorivka after Saturday’s shelling, according to the governor of Luhansk province, part of the eastern industrial heartland known as Donbas.
“The 60 people who remain under the rubble are most likely now dead,” Governor Serhiy Haidai wrote on the Telegram messaging app. Russian shelling also killed two boys, ages 11 and 14, in the nearby town of Pryvillia, he said.
As Moscow prepared to celebrate Nazi Germany’s 1945 surrender with a Victory Day military parade on Monday, a lineup of Western leaders paid surprise visits to Ukraine in a show of support. US First Lady Jill Biden met with her Ukrainian counterpart and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau raised his country’s flag at her embassy in kyiv.
The newly appointed acting US ambassador to Ukraine, Kristina Kvien, posted a photo of herself at the US embassy, touting plans for the US’s eventual return to the Ukrainian capital after the Moscow forces abandoned their attempt to storm kyiv weeks ago and began to focus on the capture. of the Donbas.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and others have warned in recent days that Russian attacks would only worsen in the run-up to Victory Day, with some cities declaring curfews or warning people not to gather in public. Russian President Vladimir Putin is believed to want to claim some kind of triumph in Ukraine as he addresses troops in Red Square.
“They have nothing to celebrate tomorrow,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the United Nations, told CNN. “They have not managed to defeat the Ukrainians. They have failed to divide the world or divide NATO. And they have only managed to isolate themselves internationally and become a pariah state throughout the world.”
Russian forces struggled to complete their takeover of Mariupol, which has been largely reduced to rubble. The sprawling steel plant by the sea where some 2,000 Ukrainian fighters made what seemed to be his last support it was the only part of the city that was not under Russian control.
The last women, children and elderly civilians sheltering with the fighters at the Azovstal plant were evacuated on Saturday. The Ukrainian troops rejected the deadlines set by the Russians to lay down their arms.
Capt. Sviatoslav Palamar, deputy commander of Ukraine’s Azov Regiment, a unit that controls the steelworks, said the site came under attack overnight by warplanes, artillery and tanks.
“We are under constant shelling,” he said online, adding that Russian ground troops tried to storm the plant – a claim Russian officials have denied in recent days – and laid mines. Palamar reported a “multitude of casualties.”
Lieutenant Illya Samoilenko, another member of the Azov Regiment, said there were a couple hundred wounded soldiers at the plant, but refused to reveal how many healthy fighters remained. He said the fighters had no life-saving equipment and had to dig by hand to free people from bunkers that had collapsed under shelling.
“Surrender for us is unacceptable because we cannot give such a gift to the enemy,” Samoilenko said.
The Ukrainian government has approached international organizations to try to ensure safe passage for defenders.
The United States announced new sanctions against Russia, cutting off Western advertising from Russia’s three largest TV stations, banning US accounting and consulting firms from providing services, and cutting off Russia’s industrial sector from wood products, industrial engines, boilers and excavators.
Trudeau met with Zelenskyy and paid a surprise visit to Irpin, who was damaged in Russia’s attempt to take kyiv. The Ukrainian president also met with German parliament speaker Bärbel Bas in kyiv to discuss further defense assistance.
Jill Biden visited Western Ukraine for a surprise Mother’s Day reunion with Zelenskyy’s wife, Olena Zelenska.
Zelenskyy released a video address on the day of the Allied victory in Europe 77 years ago, drawing parallels between the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the evils of Nazism. The black-and-white footage showed Zelenskyy standing outside a dilapidated apartment block in Borodyanka, a kyiv suburb.
Zelenskyy said generations of Ukrainians have understood the meaning of the words “Never Again,” a phrase often used as a vow not to allow the horrors of the Holocaust to be repeated.
Elsewhere, off the coast of Ukraine, explosions echoed again in the main Black Sea port of Odessa. At least five shots were heard, according to local media.
The Ukrainian military said Moscow was concentrating its main efforts on destroying airfield infrastructure in eastern and southern Ukraine.
In a sign of the stubborn resistance that has sustained the fighting into its 11th week, Ukraine’s army attacked Russian positions on a Black Sea island that was captured in the first days of the war. A satellite image from Planet Labs showed smoke billowing from two sites on the island.
But Moscow’s forces showed no sign of backing down in the south. Satellite photos show that Russia has placed armored vehicles and missile systems at a small base on the Crimean peninsula.
The heaviest fighting in recent days has taken place in eastern Ukraine. A Ukrainian counteroffensive in the northeast near Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city, is making “significant progress,” according to the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank.
However, the Ukrainian army withdrew from the besieged eastern city of Popasna, regional authorities said.
Rodion Miroshnik, a representative of the pro-Kremlin separatist Luhansk People’s Republic, said his forces and Russian troops had captured most of Popasna after two months of fierce fighting.
The Kharkiv regional administration said three people were killed in the shelling of the town of Bogodukhiv, some 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Kharkiv city.
South of Kharkiv in Dnipropetrovsk province, the governor said a 12-year-old boy was killed by a cluster munition he found after a Russian attack. An international treaty prohibits the use of such explosives, but neither Russia nor Ukraine has signed the agreement.
“This war is treacherous,” Governor Valentyn Reznichenko wrote on social media. “It’s close, even when it’s invisible.”
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Gambrell reported from Lviv, Ukraine. Yesica Fisch in Bakhmut, 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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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
Elena Becatoros and Jon Gambrell, The Associated Press
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