Russians desperate to end siege of Mariupol

Heavy fighting has been raging at the besieged steel plant in Mariupol as Russian forces attempt to finish off the city’s last-ditch defenders and complete the capture of the strategically vital port.

The bloody battle comes amid growing suspicions President Vladimir Putin wants to present the Russian people with a major battlefield success – or announce an escalation of the war – in time for Victory Day on Monday.

It is the biggest patriotic holiday on the Russian calendar, marking the Soviet Union’s triumph over Nazi Germany.

After 10 weeks of war, Ukraine’s military said it has recaptured some areas in the south and repelled other attacks in the east, further frustrating Mr Putin’s ambitions.

Ukrainian and Russian forces are fighting village by village as Moscow struggles for momentum in the eastern industrial heartland of the Donbas.

Russia switched its focus to that region – where Moscow-backed separatists have fought Ukrainian forces for years – after a defender’s resistance bogged its troops down and stopped its goal of capturing the capital Kyiv.

Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko said yesterday he had not expected the Russian offensive to “drag on this way”.

Many Russian troops used its ally as a launch pad for the invasion on February 24 and Mr Lukashenko publicly supported the attack.

“But I am not immersed in this problem enough to say whether it goes according to plan, like the Russians say, or like I feel it,” the country’s dictator said.

In the most searing example of how Ukrainian forces have slowed Russia’s progress, fighters are holed up in the tunnels and bunkers under the sprawling Azovstal steel mill in Mariupol – the last pocket of resistance in a city that is otherwise controlled by Moscow’s forces.

Civilians, believed to number around a few hundred, are also trapped inside the plant.

Ukraine said its fighters drove back a Russian assault into the giant factory, which was also being bombed from above.

“The Russian troops entered the territory of Azovstal but were kicked out by our defenders,” Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky, said on Ukrainian television.

“We can say that the fighting is ongoing.”

The Kremlin denied there is any ground assault.

Mariupol’s fall would be a major battlefield success for Moscow, depriving Ukraine of a vital port and allowing Russia to establish a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014, and free troops to fight elsewhere.

The Russians have pulverised most of Mariupol in a two-month siege that has trapped civilians with little food, water, medicine or heat.

Civilians sheltering inside the plant have perhaps suffered even more.

About 100 of them were evacuated over the weekend – the first time some had seen daylight in months.

Ukrainian forces said they had made some gains on the border of the southern regions of Kherson and Mykolaiv and repelled 11 Russian attacks in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions that make up the Donbas. Five people were killed and at least 25 hurt in shelling of cities in the Donbas.

The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said Russian forces are struggling to gain traction.

“Ukrainian defences have largely stalled Russian advances in eastern Ukraine,” it said.

Air raid sirens sounded in the western city of Lviv, which has been a gateway for Western arms and served as a relative safe haven for people fleeing fighting further east.

BATTLE RAGES: Smoke rises from the giant Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol where Ukrainian forces have held out for almost two months.