Mariupol steel mill battler ages as ukraine repels attempts to capture vital port
Heavy fighting has been raging at the besieged steel plant in Mariupol as Russian forces attempt to finish off the city’s last-ditch defenders and complete the capture of the strategically vital port.
The bloody battle comes amid growing suspicions that President Vladimir Putin wants to present the Russian people with a major battlefield success — or perhaps announce an escalation of the war — in time for Victory Day on Monday.
It is the biggest patriotic holiday on the Russian calendar, marking the Soviet Union’s triumph over Nazi Germany.
After ten weeks of war, Ukraine’s military said it has recaptured some areas in the south and repelled other attacks in the east, further frustrating Mr Putin’s ambitions.
Ukrainian and Russian forces are fighting village by village as Moscow struggles to gain momentum in the eastern industrial heartland of the Donbas.
Russia switched its focus to that region — where Moscow-backed separatists have fought Ukrainian forces for years — after a stiffer-thanexpected resistance bogged its troops down and thwarted its initial goal of overrunning the capital Kyiv.
Meanwhile, Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko said he had not expected the Russian offensive to “drag on this way”.
Some Russian troops used ally Belarus as a launch pad for the invasion on February 24, and Mr Lukashenko publicly supported the operation.
“But I am not immersed in this problem enough to say whether it goes according to plan, like the Russians say, or like I feel it,” the authoritarian leader said.
In the most searing example of how Ukrainian forces have slowed Russia’s progress, Ukrainian fighters are holed up in the tunnels and bunkers under the sprawling Azovstal steel mill in Mariupol — the last pocket of resistance in a city that is otherwise controlled by Moscow’s forces.
Civilians, believed to number around a few hundred, are also trapped inside the plant.
Ukraine said its fighters drove back a Russian assault into the giant mill, which was also being bombed from above.
“The Russian troops entered the territory of Azovstal but were kicked out by our defenders,” Oleksiy Arestovych, a presidential adviser, said in remarks on Ukrainian television.
“We can say that the fighting is ongoing.”
The Kremlin denied that there is any ground assault.
Mariupol’s fall would be a major battlefield success for Moscow, depriving Ukraine of a vital port and allowing Russia to establish a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014, and free up troops to fight elsewhere in the Donbas.
With his troops making slow progress elsewhere, Mr Putin may be looking to declare a win at the plant in time for Victory Day.