Officials: Russia tries to storm plant
Zelenskyy says he will meet Blinken and Austin in Kyiv
KYIV, Ukraine — Russian forces in Ukraine tried to storm a steel plant housing soldiers and civilians in the southern city of Mariupol on Saturday in an attempt to crush the last corner of resistance in a place of deep symbolic and strategic value to Moscow, Ukrainian officials said.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, meanwhile, announced he would meet Sunday in Kyiv with the U.S. secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and with the U.S. secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin. The White House declined comment.
Speaking in a news conference, Zelenskyy gave little detail about the encounter but said he expected concrete results — “not just presents or some kind of cakes, we are expecting specific things and specific weapons.”
The reported assault on the steel plant on the eve of Orthodox Easter came after the Kremlin claimed its military had seized all of the shattered city except for the Azovstal plant, and as Russian forces pounded other cities and towns in southern and eastern Ukraine.
Elsewhere in the country, a 3-month-old baby was among six people killed when Russia fired cruise missiles at the Black Sea port city of Odesa, officials said.
“The war started when this baby was one month old. Can you imagine what is happening?” Zelenskyy said.
The fate of the Ukrainians in the sprawling steel mill in Mariupol 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.
Meanwhile, Russia said it had taken control of several villages elsewhere in the eastern Donbas region and destroyed 11 Ukrainian military targets overnight, including three artillery warehouses.
Journalists observed shelling in residential areas of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city; regional Gov. Oleh Sinehubov said three people were killed. In the Luhansk area of the Donbas, Gov. Serhiy Haidai said six people died during the shelling of a village, Gorskoi.
In Sloviansk, a town
in northern Donbas, AP witnessed two soldiers arriving at a hospital, one of them mortally wounded. Nearby, a small group of people gathered outside a church where a priest blessed them with water on Holy Saturday. Ukrainian officials announced a nationwide curfew ahead of Easter Sunday.
Mariupol has been a key Russian objective since the invasion began Feb. 24 and has taken on outsize importance in the war. Completing its capture would deprive the Ukrainians of a vital port, free up Russian troops to fight elsewhere and establish a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow seized in 2014.
An advisor to Ukraine’s
presidential office, Oleksiy Arestovich, said Russian forces resumed air strikes on the Azovstal plant and were also trying to storm it. Two days earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin had given an order to blockade the plant.
Ukrainian officials have estimated that about 2,000 of their troops are inside the plant along with civilians sheltering in its underground tunnels. More than 100,000 people — down from a prewar population of about 430,000 — are believed to remain in Mariupol. Ukrainian authorities estimate that over 20,000 civilians have been killed in the city.
Ukrainian officials had said they would try
again Saturday to evacuate women, children and older adults from Mariupol, but like similar previous plans, it failed. Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to Mariupol’s mayor, said Russian forces did not allow Ukrainian-organized buses to take residents to Zaporizhzhia, about 140 miles to the northwest.
Regarding the expected visit Sunday from U.S. officials, Zelenskyy said: “I believe that we will be able to get agreements from the United States or part of that package on arming Ukraine which we agreed on earlier. Besides, we have strategic questions about security guarantees, which it is time to discuss in detail, because the United States will be one of those leaders of security countries for our state.”
Also Saturday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson talked with Zelenskyy and promised more drones, vehicles and antitank missiles.
Bolstered by heavy weapons from Western nations, Zelenskyy has expressed confidence that Ukraine was prepared to defeat Russian forces in what is expected to be a battle for control of the eastern industrial heartland.
“We will be able to show the occupiers that the day when they will be forced to leave Ukraine is approaching,” he said in an overnight address.