Smiles of kids trapped in hell
DESPITE being trapped in a tunnel under a steel plant for weeks, brave children still manage to smile as they tell of how they are desperate to see sunlight.
The youngsters were photographed yesterday while still hiding out at the Azovstal works in Ukraine – the last part of besieged Mariupol still undefeated.
An estimated 1,000 civilians and 2,000 troops are inside the giant complex.
In footage from the Ukraine National Guard‘s Azov Regiment yesterday, women and children in a crowded room say they are running out of food and water and plead to be freed. “We have been playing on the phone, but we want to go home and see the sun,” says a girl. A boy adds: “We want to return alive to see our relatives.”
Russian forces yesterday resumed air strikes in an bid to storm the steel plant, said Ukrainian officials. It was not clear if there had been new fatalities two days after Vladimir Putin told troops to “block it so that a fly cannot not pass through”.
Plans to evacuate women, children and elderly people from the rest of Mariupol were abandoned yesterday when the Russians warned of new shelling.
At least five people were killed and 18 wounded when a missile struck flats in Odessa, according to Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak. Four were reportedly killed by Russian shelling in the eastern cities of Popasna and Kharkiv.
After the Kremlin said it aims to seize southern Ukraine and form a land bridge to Crimea, President Zelensky warned: “Then they want to capture other countries.”