ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine (AP) — Dozens more civilians were rescued Friday from tunnels under the besieged steel plant where Ukrainian fighters in Mariupol have been making their last stand to prevent Moscow from taking full control of the major port city. strategic.
Russian and Ukrainian officials said 50 people were evacuated from the Azovstal plant and handed over to representatives of the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross. The Russian military said the group included 11 children.
Russian officials and Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said evacuation efforts would continue on Saturday. The latest evacuees joined approximately 500 other civilians who have left the plant and the city in recent days.
The fight for the last Ukrainian stronghold in a city reduced to ruins for the Russian attack seemed increasingly desperate amid mounting speculation that President Vladimir Putin wants to end the battle for Mariupol so he can present a victory to the Russian people in time to Monday Victory Daythe biggest patriotic holiday in the Russian calendar.
As the holiday commemorating the Soviet Union’s World War II victory over Nazi Germany approached, Ukrainian cities braced for an expected surge in Russian attacks, and authorities urged residents to pay attention. to air raid warnings.
“These symbolic dates are to the Russian aggressor like red is to a bull,” Ukraine’s First Deputy Interior Minister Yevhen Yenin said. “While the whole civilized world remembers the victims of terrible wars these days, the Russian Federation wants parades and prepares to dance on bones in Mariupol.”
According to the most recent Russian estimate, approximately 2,000 Ukrainian fighters are hidden in the vast labyrinth of tunnels and bunkers under the Azovstal steelworks, and have repeatedly refused to surrender. Ukrainian officials said ahead of Friday’s evacuations that a few hundred civilians were also trapped there, and fears for their safety have grown as the fighting has grown fiercer in recent days.
Kateryna Prokopenko, whose husband Denys Prokopenko runs the Troops of the Azov Regiment inside the plant, he issued a desperate plea to spare the fighters as well. She said they would be willing to go to a third country to wait out the war, but would never surrender to Russia because that would mean “filtration camps, prison, torture and death.”
If nothing is done to save her husband and his men, “they will hold out to the end without giving up,” she told The Associated Press on Friday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said “influential states” were involved in the efforts to rescue the soldiers, though he did not name any.
“We are also working on diplomatic options to save our troops that are still in Azovstal,” he said in his late-night video address.
UN officials have remained mum about civilian evacuation efforts, but it seemed likely the last evacuees were taken to Zaporizhzhia, a Ukrainian-controlled city about 140 miles (230 kilometers) northwest of Mariupol, where they were held. others who escaped from the port city. He brought.
Some of the previous evacuees from the plant. spoke to AP about the horrors of being surrounded by death in the musty underground bunker with little food and water, poor medical care, and dwindling hope. Some said they felt guilty for leaving others behind.
“People literally rot like our jackets did,” said Serhii Kuzmenko, 31, who fled with his wife, 8-year-old daughter and four others from their bunker, where 30 others were left behind. “They urgently need our help. We have to get them out.”
Fighters defending the plant said on the Telegram messaging app on Friday that Russian troops had fired on an evacuation vehicle on the plant grounds. They said the car was moving toward civilians when it was hit by shelling, with one soldier killed and six wounded.
Moscow did not immediately acknowledge the renewed fighting there on Friday.
Russia took control of the rest of Mariupol after bombing it for two months. Before Victory Day, municipal workers and volunteers cleaned up what remains of the city, which had a pre-war population of more than 400,000. Perhaps 100,000 civilians remain there with scarce supplies of food, water, electricity and heat. Bulldozers scooped up the rubble and people swept the streets against a background of hollowed-out buildings. Russian flags were raised.
The fall of Mariupol would deprive the Ukraine of a vital port. It would also allow Russia to establish a land corridor to the Crimean peninsula, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014, and free up some Russian troops to fight in other parts of the Donbas, the eastern industrial region that the Kremlin says is now its main objective. His capture also has a symbolic value since the city has been the scene of some of the worst suffering of war and surprisingly fierce resistance.
As they pounded the plant, Russian forces were struggling to make significant gains elsewhere, 10 weeks after a devastating war that has killed thousands, forced millions to flee the country and leveled large swaths of cities.
Ukrainian officials said the risk of massive shelling increased ahead of Victory Day. kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said authorities would step up street patrols in the capital. A curfew is expected to come into force in the Odessa region of southern Ukraine, which was the target of two missile strikes on Friday.
The general staff of the Ukrainian army said on Friday that its forces repelled 11 attacks in the Donbas region and destroyed tanks and armored vehicles, further frustrating Putin’s ambitions after his failed attempt to seize kyiv. Russia did not acknowledge the losses.
The Ukrainian military also said it had made gains in the northeastern Kharkiv region, recapturing five villages and part of a sixth. Meanwhile, one person was reported killed and three more wounded on Friday as a result of Russian shelling in Lyman, a town in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.
In other Friday news:
— A Ukrainian army brigade said it used a US Switchblade “suicide” drone against Russian forces in what was likely the first recorded use of such a weapon in Ukraine in combat.
— US President Joe Biden has authorized an additional $150 million in military assistance to Ukraine for artillery rounds and radar systems. Biden said the latest spending means his administration has “almost exhausted” what Congress authorized for Ukraine in March. He called on lawmakers to quickly pass a $33 billion-plus spending package that will last through September.
— The Ukrainian governor of the eastern Luhansk region said residents of the city of Kreminna were being terrorized by Russian troops trying to cross the Seversky Donets River. Serhiy Haidai accused Russian troops of going through phones and “forcibly making Ukrainian patriots disappear.” His statement could not be immediately verified.
— Haidia also said more than 15,000 people remain in Severodonetsk, a city in the Lugansk region that is seen as a key Russian target. She said she believes most residents want to stay even though “whole blocks of houses are on fire.”
— The small town of Nekhoteevk, in Russia’s southern Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, was being evacuated due to shelling from Ukrainian territory, according to regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov. His claims could not be immediately verified.
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Gambrell reported from Lviv, Ukraine. Associated Press writers Trisha Thomas in Rome, 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. office.
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