President wants weapons, not cakes

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 pocket 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 the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and the US secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin in Kyiv. The White House declined to comment.

Speaking at a news conference, Zelenskyy gave little detail about logistics of the encounter but said he expected concrete results – ‘‘not just presents or some kind of cakes, we are expecting specific things and specific weapons’’.

It would be the first high-level US trip to Kyiv since the war began February 24.

In attacks on the eve of Orthodox Easter, Russian forces pounded cities and towns in southern and eastern Ukraine.

A 3-month-old baby was among eight people killed when Russia fired cruise missiles at the Black Sea port city of Odesa, officials said. Zelenskyy said 18 more were wounded.

‘‘The war started when this baby was one month old. Can you imagine what is happening?’’ Zelenskyy said. ‘‘They are just bastards ... I don’t have any other words for it, just bastards.’’

The Ukrainian military said Saturday it destroyed a Russian command post in Kherson, a southern city that fell to Russian forces early in the war.

The command post was hit on Friday, killing two generals and critically wounding another, the Ukrainian military intelligence agency said. The Russian military did not comment on the claim, which could not be confirmed.

Oleksiy Arestovych, a Zelenskyy adviser, said in an online interview that 50 senior Russian officers were in the command centre when it was attacked.

Russia said it took control of several villages in the eastern Donbas region and destroyed 11 Ukrainian military targets overnight, including three artillery warehouses. Russian attacks also struck populated areas.

Associated Press journalists observed shelling in residential areas of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city; regional governor Oleh Sinehubov said three people were killed. In the Luhansk area of the Donbas, Governor Serhiy Haidai said six people died during the shelling of a village, Gorskoi.

In Sloviansk, a town in northern Donbas, the AP witnessed two soldiers arriving at a hospital, one of them mortally wounded.

Sitting in a wheelchair outside her damaged Sloviansk apartment, Anna Direnskaya, 70, said, ‘‘I want peace.’’

One of many native Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine, Direnskaya said she wished Russians would understand that Ukrainians were not bad people and that there should be no enmity between them.

‘‘Why is this happening?’’ she said. ‘‘I don’t know.’’

While British officials said Russian forces had not 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.

An adviser to Ukraine’s presidential office, Oleksiy Arestovich, said Russian forces resumed airstrikes on Mariupol’s Azovstal plant and were also trying to storm it, in an apparent reversal of tactics. Two days earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin had given an order not to send troops in but instead to blockade the plant.

Yet another attempt to evacuate women, children and older adults from Mariupol failed Saturday. Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to Mariupol’s mayor, said Russian forces did not allow Ukrainianorganised buses to take residents to Zaporizhzhia, a city 227 kilometres to the northwest.

‘‘At 11 o’clock, at least 200 Mariupol residents gathered near the Port City shopping centre, waiting for evacuation,’’ Andryushchenko posted on the Telegram messaging app. ‘‘The Russian military drove up to the Mariupol residents and ordered them to disperse, because now there will be shelling.’’

At the same time, he said, Russian buses assembled about 200 metres away. Residents who boarded those were told they were being taken to separatistoccupied territory and not allowed to disembark, Andryushchenko said. His account could not be independently verified.

In the attack on Odesa, Russian troops fired at least six missiles, according to Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister.

‘‘Residents of the city heard explosions in different areas,’’ Gerashchenko said via Telegram. ‘‘Residential buildings were hit. It is already known about one victim. He burned in his car in a courtyard of one of the buildings.’’ –