Commander issues desperate plea for help from besieged city

A Ukrainian marine commander in the besieged city of Mariupol issued his “last address to the world” on Wednesday (local time), saying his men would not surrender as Russian forces closed in.

“It is possible that we have just days or hours left,” Major Serhiy Volyna, a commander in Ukraine’s national guard, said. He appealed for international assistance for the 500 wounded soldiers and hundreds of women and children at Azovstal steelworks, the last bastion of resistance in Mariupol.

“We call on world leaders to help us,” Mr Volyna said. “We urge them to organise an extraction to take us to a third country. The units of the enemy exceed ours dozens of times, they prevail in the air, in artillery, in ground troops, and in machines and tanks.”

Despite Ukrainian soldiers retaining a “good fighting spirit”, the situation for the wounded was “very bad”, he said. “They are in a basement. They are just rotting there.”

Hope rose for the soldiers hours later when President Volodymyr Zelensky said he was ready to swap Russian prisoners of war in exchange for the safe passage of civilians and troops out of Mariupol.

He said about 1000 civilians were sheltering in the tunnels, passageways and blast furnaces of the steelworks.

The situation in the besieged city was getting worse, with hundreds of wounded and 100,000 civilians believed to be living there, he added.

Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, had earlier accused Ukraine of holding back peace negotiations, saying the ball was in Kyiv’s court after it was handed a document.

Mr Zelensky said, however, that he had not seen or heard of any document connected to peace talks.

Russian forces gave the last defenders of Mariupol a further chance to surrender on Wednesday as Ukraine said it was prioritising efforts to move civilians from the city.

Russian artillery units and armoured brigades have surrounded the steelworks in the southeastern port. It was claimed that the industrial complex and its underground shelters were hit with “bunkerbuster” bombs overnight.

Iryna Vereshchuk, one of Ukraine’s deputy prime ministers, said a preliminary agreement was reached with Russian forces to evacuate women, children and the elderly after previous attempts failed.

However talks later broke down again.