Final stand by defenders of battered city

Anew international effort raced to rescue more civilians from Mariupol as fighters holed up at the city’s steelworks made their last stand.

The fight in the last Ukrainian stronghold of a city reduced to ruins by the Russian onslaught appeared increasingly desperate and comes amid growing speculation Vladimir Putin wants to finish the battle for Mariupol so he can present a triumph to the Russian people in time for Monday’s Victory Day.

Some 2,000 Ukrainian fighters and a few hundred civilians are believed to be holed up in a maze of tunnels beneath the Azovstal steelworks.

The Ukrainians say Russian troops have stormed the steelworks and are also striking it from the air, but the wife of one commander at the plant said they had vowed to “stand till the end”.

“They won’t surrender,” Kateryna Prokopenko said on Thursday after speaking by phone to her husband, Denys Prokopenko.

People escaping Mariupol have to pass through contested areas and many checkpoints – sometimes taking days to reach relative safety in the Ukrainian-controlled city of Zaporizhzhia, about 140 miles to the north-west.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was similarly defiant in his nightly video address.

“There are many wounded fighters, but they are not surrendering,” he said.

“They are holding their positions.”

While the Russians have pulverised much of Mariupol, the Kremlin has denied its troops were storming the plant, while accusing Ukrainian fighters of preventing the civilians from leaving.

The Russians managed to enter the plant on Wednesday with the help of an electrician who knew the layout, said Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior ministry.

United Nations officials announced on Thursday they were launching a third effort to evacuate citizens from the plant and the city, with UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres vowing to do everything possible “to get people out”.

The fall of Mariupol would deprive Ukraine of a vital port, allow Russia to establish a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014, and free up troops in the eastern Donbas region to fight elsewhere.

Its capture also holds symbolic value since the city has been the scene of some of the worst suffering of the war and surprisingly fierce resistance.

NO SURRENDER: The Russians have been besieging the sprawling Azovstal steelworks.