LVIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian fighters in the tunnels beneath the Mariupol pulverized steel plant held off Russian troops Thursday in an increasingly desperate and perhaps doomed effort to deny Moscow what would be its greatest success of the war so far: the complete capture of the strategic port city.
The bloody battle came amid growing speculation that President Vladimir Putin wants to present the Russian people with victory on the battlefield, or announce an escalation of the war, in time for Victory Day on Monday. Victory Day is the most important patriotic holiday on the Russian calendar and marks the triumph of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany.
Some 2,000 Ukrainian fighters, according to the latest Russian estimate, have taken refuge in Mariupol’s sprawling Azovstal steelworks, the last pocket of resistance in a city largely reduced to rubble in the past two months. A few hundred civilians were also believed to be trapped there.
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.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the attack prevented the evacuation of civilians who remained in the plant’s underground bunkers.
“Imagine this hell! And there are children there,” he said Thursday night in his late-night video address. “Over two months of constant bombing, bombing, constant killing.”
The Russians managed to get in 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 posted Wednesday night. “Yesterday, the Russians began raiding these tunnels, using the information they received from the traitor.”
The Kremlin denied that its troops were storming the plant.
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.”
The Kremlin has demanded the surrender of the troops. They have refused. Russia has also accused them of preventing civilians from leaving.
The United Nations chief said another attempt to evacuate civilians from Mariupol and the plant was under way. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said: “We must continue to do everything we can to get people out of these hellish landscapes.”
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.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Russian forces are making only “heavy” progress in the Donbas.
The head of the British armed forces, Chief of Defense Staff Admiral Tony Radakin, said Putin is “trying to rush to a tactical victory” ahead of Victory Day. But he said Russian forces are struggling to gain momentum.
Radakin told Britain’s Talk TV broadcaster that Russia is using missiles and weapons at such a rate that it is in a “logistics war” to stay supplied. “This is going to be hard work,” he said.
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.
In other developments, Belarus’ authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko defended Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in an interview with The Associated Press, but said he did not expect the conflict to “prolong like this.”
Lukashenko, whose country was used by the Russians as a launching pad for the invasion, said Moscow had to act because kyiv was “provoking” Russia.
But he also created some distance between himself and the Kremlin, repeatedly calling for an end to the conflict and referring to it as a “war,” a term Moscow refuses to use. He insists on calling the fighting a “special military operation.”
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 from Zarozhne and rocket launchers near the south. Mykolayiv city.
Five people were killed and dozens wounded in shelling of towns in the Donbas over the past 24 hours, Ukrainian officials said, with shells hitting schools, apartments and a medical center.
Ukrainian forces said they made some progress on the border in the southern regions of Kherson and Mykolaiv and repelled 11 Russian attacks in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions that make up the Donbas.
The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said Ukrainian forces “have largely halted Russian advances in eastern Ukraine” and intensified Russian airstrikes against transportation infrastructure in western Ukraine. of the country have failed to stop Western aid shipments to Ukraine.
But the war has devastated the country’s medical infrastructure, Zelenskyy said in a video link to a charity event in the UK, with nearly 400 healthcare facilities damaged or destroyed.
“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 more distant 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.
Reference-www.9and10news.com