Putin reins in Russian troops in Mariupol, but claims success
SVIATOHIRSK, Ukraine — Russia claimed victory over the battered southern Ukrainian port of Mariupol on Thursday, with President Vladimir Putin saying he had ordered his forces not to attack the city’s last holdouts sheltering in a vast steelworks but to blockade the compound so tightly that “not even a fly comes through.”
Ukraine’s government did not confirm the Russian assertion of a complete takeover of the once-thriving coastal city, which has been nearly wiped out in the course of nonstop attack. But Putin’s announcement that troops would not storm the sprawling Azovstal steel plant — where both Ukrainian forces and civilians are holed up — was at once a sign of Russian confidence in its grip on Mariupol and of the fierce resistance of local defenders who have refused the enemy’s demands to surrender. Control of Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, has been among Russia’s key strategic goals since it launched its war on Ukraine exactly eight weeks ago. The former metropolis of nearly half a million people — now a sea of rubble with three-fourths of its population displaced or dead — would allow Russia to create a land corridor connecting Russian-controlled parts of eastern Ukraine to Crimea, the peninsula Moscow illegally seized in 2014 in a foreshadowing of the present conflict.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Thursday that Mariupol had been “liberated,” a phrase Moscow has used in its attempt to portray its invasion as a humanitarian mission to save Ukraine from “neoNazis.” In reality, the war has left thousands of civilians dead, created more than 5 million refugees and rallied international powers in support of Ukraine, a democracy led by a Jewish president.
Ukrainian officials, who all but admitted that Mariupol had fallen, said Thursday that there would be additional attempts to evacuate civilians from the region. They also said they wanted to negotiate the status of the city.
Speaking on the messaging app Telegram, Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said that “we demand from the Russians an urgent humanitarian corridor from the Mariupol plant Azovstal. There are now about 1,000 civilians and 500 wounded soldiers. They all need to be removed from Azovstal today.”
Separately, a senior Ukrainian official said he was prepared to travel to Mariupol for new negotiations “without any conditions” after several previous rounds of talks failed to produce a cease-fire.