ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine — Women and children have been evacuated from a steel plant that is the last defensive bastion in the bombed-out ruins of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, while U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited to the Ukrainian president in the country’s capital in a show of American support.
Russia’s offensive on Ukraine’s southern coast and the country’s eastern industrial heartland has Ukrainian forces fighting village by village and more civilians fleeing airstrikes and artillery shelling as war comes to their doorsteps.
Thousands of residents were believed to remain trapped with little food, water or medicine in the blockaded Mariupol. The United Nations was working to negotiate the evacuation of up to 1,000 civilians who were holed up with some 2,000 Ukrainian fighters under a sprawling Soviet-era steel plant that is the only part of the city not occupied by the Russians.
Images released early Sunday by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office showed Pelosi in kyiv with a congressional delegation that included Reps. Jason Crow, Jim McGovern, Gregory Meeks and Adam Schiff. The visit was not previously announced.
“We think we visited to thank you for your fight for freedom,” said Pelosi, second in line to the US presidency after the vice president and the highest-ranking US leader to visit Ukraine since the start of the election. war.
“We are on a border of freedom and their fight is a fight for everyone. Our commitment is to be there for you until the fight is over,” Pelosi added.
Pelosi’s office did not say when the meeting took place, but light from the video and other details suggested the meeting took place on Saturday. Members of Congress Barbara Lee and Bill Keating were also in the delegation, although it was not clear if they were in kyiv.
The delegation was scheduled to hold a press conference in the Polish city of Rzeszow on Sunday.
Russian forces have embarked on a major military operation to seize significant parts of southern and eastern Ukraine following their failure to capture the capital. Mariupol is a major target due to its strategic location near the Crimean peninsula, which Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014.
Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency said on Saturday that 19 adults and six children had been taken from the Azovstal steelworks, but gave no further details.
A senior official from the Azov Regiment, the Ukrainian unit defending the plant, said 20 civilians were evacuated during a ceasefire, although it was not clear if he was referring to the same group. There was no UN confirmation.
“They are women and children,” Sviatoslav Palamar said in a video posted on the regiment’s Telegram channel. He also called for the evacuation of the wounded: “We do not know why they are not taken away and their evacuation to the territory controlled by Ukraine is not discussed.”
Ukraine has blamed the failure of numerous previous evacuation attempts on continued Russian bombardment.
UN humanitarian spokesman Saviano Abreu said the world organization was negotiating with authorities in Moscow and kyiv over the Mariupol evacuations, but could not provide details of the ongoing effort “due to the complexity and fluidity of the operation.” .
Abreu did not confirm the video posted on social media allegedly showing UN-branded vehicles in Mariupol.
In the town of Lyman in the Donetsk region, where at least half the population has fled Russian bombing, around 20 elderly people and children with bags in their hands along with their dogs and cats boarded a minivan marked with a placard. that said “evacuation of children” in Ukrainian. . It sped towards the city of Dnipro as explosions could be heard in the distance.
“The liberators have come and have freed us from what? Our lives?” said Nina Mihaylenko, a professor of Russian language and literature, referring to the Russian forces.
Video and images from inside the plant, shared with The Associated Press by two Ukrainian women who said their husbands are among the fighters refusing to surrender there, showed unidentified men in stained bandages; others had open wounds or amputated limbs.
A skeleton medical staff was treating at least 600 injured people, said the women, who identified their husbands as members of the Azov Regiment of Ukraine’s National Guard. Some of the wounds were rotting with gangrene, they said.
In the video, the men said they eat just once a day and share as little as 1.5 liters (50 ounces) of water a day between four people, and that supplies inside the besieged facility are depleted.
The AP was unable to independently verify the date and location of the video, which the women say was taken last week in the maze of corridors and bunkers below the plant.
The women urged that Ukrainian fighters also be evacuated along with civilians, warning that they could be tortured and executed if captured. “Soldiers’ lives also matter,” Yuliia Fedusiuk told the AP in Rome.
In his late-night video address Saturday night, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy switched to Russian to urge Russian troops not to fight in Ukraine, saying even his generals expect thousands more to die.
The president accused Moscow of recruiting new soldiers “with little motivation and little combat experience” so that units destroyed early in the war can return to battle.
“Each Russian soldier can still save his own life,” Zelenskyy said. “It is better for you to survive in Russia than to perish on our land.”
In other developments:
— Ukraine’s Deputy Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotsky said in televised remarks that Russian forces have seized hundreds of thousands of tons of grain in territory under their control. Ukraine is a major grain producer, and the invasion has pushed up world prices and raised concerns about shortages.
— A Russian rocket attack destroyed an airport runway in Odessa, Ukraine’s third-most populous city and a key Black Sea port, the Ukrainian military said.
Getting a full picture of the unfolding battle in eastern Ukraine has been difficult because airstrikes and artillery shelling have made it extremely dangerous for reporters to move. In addition, both the Ukrainian and Moscow-backed rebels have introduced strict restrictions on reporting from the combat zone.
But Western military analysts suggested the offensive in the Donbas region, which includes Mariupol, was going much slower than planned. So far, Russian troops and separatists appear to have made only minor gains in the month since Moscow said it would concentrate its military force in the east.
Numerically, Russia’s military manpower vastly outnumbers Ukraine’s. In the days before the war began, Western intelligence estimated that Russia had stationed as many as 190,000 troops near the border; Ukraine’s standing army numbers about 200,000, spread throughout the country.
With plenty of firepower still in reserve, Russia’s offensive could still escalate and overwhelm the Ukrainians. Overall, the Russian military has an estimated 900,000 active duty personnel. Russia also has a much larger air force and navy.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in military assistance have poured into Ukraine since the war began, but Russia’s vast arsenals mean that Ukraine will continue to need large amounts of support.
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Fisch reported from Sloviansk. Associated Press writers Jon Gambrell and Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Mstyslav Chernov in Kharkiv, Lolita C. Baldor in Washington, Trisha Thompson in Rome, 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
Reference-abcnews.go.com