Rescuers were seeking to evacuate more civilians from tunnels under a sprawling steel plant in Mariupol as Ukrainian fighters make their last stand to prevent Moscow from taking full control of the strategically important port city.
Dozens of people were evacuated from the Azovstal plant on Friday and handed over to representatives of the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, Russian and Ukrainian officials said. The Russian military said the group of 50 included 11 children.
Russian officials and Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said evacuation efforts would continue through the weekend. The latest evacuees followed 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 by the Russian attack seemed increasingly desperate. And there has been growing speculation that President Vladimir Putin wants to end the battle for Mariupol so he can present a triumph to the Russian people in time for Monday’s Victory Day, the 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 entire civilized world remembers the victims of terrible wars these days, the Russian Federation wants parades and prepares to dance on bones in Mariupol.”
Museum allegedly destroyed
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also reminded people not to go into forests that recently came under Russian occupation due to the many remaining landmines and tripwires.
A Russian missile destroyed a Ukrainian national museum dedicated to the life and work of an 18th-century philosopher on Saturday, the local council said. He posted photos on Facebook showing the Gregory Skovoroda museum engulfed in flames.
As an indication of its importance to Ukraine’s cultural heritage, the image of Skovoroda adorns a Ukrainian banknote.
The museum in Skovorodynivka is located near the Russian border in the Kharkiv region, where fighting has been fierce.
Efforts underway to save soldiers: Zelensky
According to Russia’s most recent estimate, approximately 2,000 Ukrainian fighters are holed up in the vast labyrinth of tunnels and bunkers below the Azovstal steel mill. They have repeatedly refused to give up. 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, commands the Azov Regiment troops inside the plant, made a desperate plea for the fighters to be spared 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.
Zelensky said “influential states” are 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.
Evacuees recount horrors
UN officials have remained mum about the civilian evacuation efforts, but it seemed likely that the latest evacuees were taken to Zaporizhzhia, a Ukrainian-controlled city about 230 kilometers northwest of Mariupol, where others who escaped from the port city.
Some of the plant’s previous evacuees spoke to the AP about the horrors of being surrounded by death in the moldy underground bunker with little food and water, poor medical care and dwindling hope. Some said they felt guilty for leaving others behind.
“They urgently need our help. We need to get them out,” said Serhii Kuzmenko, 31, who fled with his wife, his eight-year-old daughter and four others from his bunker, where 30 others remained.
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, killing one soldier.
Moscow did not immediately acknowledge the renewed fighting there on Friday.
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.
Odessa region to adopt curfew
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. The Odessa region of southern Ukraine, which was the target of two missile attacks on Friday, was to adopt a curfew.
The Ukrainian army’s general staff said its forces repelled 11 attacks in the Donbas region and destroyed tanks and armored vehicles, further thwarting 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.
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 despite severe shortages of food, water, electricity and heating. 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.
The capture of the city also has symbolic value, as it has been the scene of some of the worst suffering of the war and surprisingly fierce resistance.
Reference-www.cbc.ca