‘We are facing our last days’
MARIUPOL could fall into Russian hands within “hours”, a Ukrainian official said following a two-month siege, as the enemies agreed yesterday to a humanitarian corridor for civilians to flee the devastated port city.
As fighting raged in the country’s east and south, the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, arrived in Kyiv in the latest sign of strengthening ties between Ukraine and the EU. His visit comes as the West continues to pour weapons into Ukraine amid a renewed Russian push into the eastern Donbas region where a new offensive launched this week has led to an uptick in fighting.
Hours ahead of Michel’s arrival, the Pentagon said that Ukraine had recently received fighter planes and spare parts to bolster its air force, following repeated calls from Kyiv for heavier weapons.
Ukraine’s air force later hit back at the claim, saying they had only received spare parts to repair existing planes and had not been given additional aircraft. The announcement came as the battle for Mariupol appeared to be nearing a crucial tipping point, after months of devastating fighting that has seen untold numbers of civilians trapped and killed.
Control of Mariupol and the separatist-controlled Donbas region in the east would allow Moscow to create a southern corridor to the Crimean Peninsula that it annexed in 2014, depriving Ukraine of much of its coastline.
Moscow made another call for the city’s defenders to surrender yesterday and announced the opening of a humanitarian corridor for any Ukrainian troops who agreed to lay down their arms.
A commander in the besieged Azovstal steel plant issued a desperate plea for help, saying his marines were “maybe facing our last days, if not hours. The enemy is outnumbering us 10 to one,” Serhiy Volyna from the 36th Separate Marine Brigade said. “We appeal and plead to all world leaders to help us. We ask them to use the procedure of extraction and take us to the territory of a third-party state.”
Thousands of troops and civilians remain holed up in the plant. An adviser to the mayor of Mariupol described a “horrible situation” in the encircled complex and reported that up to 2 000 people, mostly women and children, are without “normal” supplies of drinking water, food and fresh air.
Svyatoslav Palamar, a commander in the nationalist Azov battalion defending Mariupol, said the Russian attack on the sprawling steel complex was relentless. “Powerful bombs have been dropped several times on Azovstal, we have been bombed from boats ... we are under siege. The front is 360°,” said Palamar, adding that hundreds of civilians were also trapped at the plant.
Kyiv said it had earlier agreed with Russian forces to open a safe route for civilians to flee the devastated city.
Elsewhere on the front lines, Ukraine’s defence ministry reported its troops had beaten back a Russian attack in the city of Izium, south of the partly blockaded second city of Kharkiv in the east. Kyiv also claimed enemy losses in a Ukrainian counterattack near Marinka in Donetsk.
Russia yesterday said its forces had launched 73 airstrikes across Ukraine, hitting dozens of locations where troops were concentrated. In eastern Ukraine’s Kramatorsk, a large city in the Donetsk region, residents were already braced for the worst.
Further from the front lines, residents were still reeling weeks after Russian forces withdrew from the area near the capital Kyiv.
At a morgue in Bucha, families carefully searched body bags and examined cadavers looking for missing loved ones. Four hundred bodies have been discovered since the Russians withdrew on March 31, said local police chief Vitaly Lobas. About a quarter of them are still unidentified.
President Vladimir Putin’s forces have faced allegations of war crimes. Michel during his visit to Kyiv yesterday toured the nearby town of Borodianka. “History will not forget the war crimes that have been committed here,” he said.
Meanwhile, Putin said yesterday that Russia had successfully tested a Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile, and that the next-generation capable of carrying nuclear charges would make Kremlin’s enemies “think twice”.