Russia renews assault on Mariupol
Russian forces in Ukraine tried to storm a steel plant housing soldiers and civilians in the southern city of Mariupol on Saturday while attempting to crush the last corner of resistance in a location of high symbolic and strategic value to Moscow, Ukrainian officials said.
The reported assault on the eve of Orthodox Easter came after the Kremlin claimed its military had seized all of Mariupol except for the Azovstal plant and as Russia’s military pounded other cities and towns in southern and eastern Ukraine.
The fate of the Ukrainians holed up in the sprawling seaside steel mill wasn’t immediately clear; earlier Saturday, a Ukrainian military unit released a video reportedly taken two days earlier in which women and children holed up underground, some for as long as two months, said they longed to see the sun. As the battle for shattered Mariupol ground on, Russia claimed it had taken control of several villages elsewhere in the eastern Donbas region and destroyed 11 military Ukrainian military targets overnight, including three artillery warehouses. Associated Press journalists also observed shelling in residential areas of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, and in Sloviansk, a town in northern Donbas.
While British officials said the Russians hadn’t gained significant new ground, Ukrainian officials announced a nationwide curfew ahead of Easter Sunday, a sign of the war’s disruption and threat to the entire country.
Occupying Mariupol would deprive the Ukrainians of a vital port, free up Russian troops to fight elsewhere and allow Russia to create a land corridor with the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014.
An advisor to Ukraine’s presidential office, Oleksiy Arestovich, said during a Saturday briefing that Russian forces had resumed air strikes on the Azovstal plant and were trying to storm it. A direct attempt to take the plant would represent a reversal from an order Russian President Vladimir Putin gave two days earlier.
Second mass grave
Satellite images released this week showed what appeared to be a second mass grave near Mariupol, and local officials accused Russia of burying thousands of civilians to conceal the slaughter taking place there.
The Kremlin hasn’t responded to the satellite images. In his nightly video address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy denounced all the war’s casualties, noting that the Easter holiday commemorates Christ’s resurrection after his death by crucifixion. On Saturday, Russian forces also fired at least six cruise missiles at Odesa, said Anton Gerashchenko, an advisor to Ukraine’s interior minister. At least one landed and exploded, he said. A 3-month-old baby was among the five people killed in the missile attack.
In the Donbas, Luhansk Gov. Serhiy Haidai said Saturday that two people were killed by Russian shelling in the city of Popasna. Separately, Kharkiv regional governor Oleh Synehubov reported that two people were killed and 19 more wounded by Russian shelling.
Synehubov said that over the past day, the Russian forces fired at the region’s civilian infrastructure 56 times. Fierce Ukrainian counterattacks nonetheless slowed the Russian offensive in the east, Ukrainian and British officials said on Saturday.