Fall of Mariupol imminent as Russians block access to sea
THE strategic port city of Mariupol was last night on the verge of falling to Russia. Kyiv also admitted for the first time it had lost access to the Sea of Azov, which connects eastern territory controlled by Moscow-backed separatists and the Russian-annexed Crimean Peninsula.
A combined Russian force of infantry, tanks and artillery was pushing into areas of downtown Mariupol, raising fears that the city was about to fall entirely into Russian hands.
A brutal siege over the past three weeks has left some 300,000 Ukrainians trapped there, with at least 2,000 killed by indiscriminate shelling.
Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, conceded that Mariupol was now beyond help. The nearest forces that could assist Mariupol’s defenders were 60 miles away and already engaged in battle, he disclosed.
“There is currently no military solu
tion to Mariupol,” he said. Mariupol’s position on the Sea of Azov has made it a key target for the Kremlin.
Last night, Mariupol’s mayor, Vadym Boychenko, said Ukrainian forces were heavily outgunned. He told the BBC: “Our forces are doing everything they can to hold their position in the city, but the forces of the enemy are larger than ours.” Mr Boychenko said the fighting was also hampering efforts to rescue up to 1,000 people trapped inside the basement of a theatre bombed by Russia on Wednesday. While 130 people escaped on Friday, there was no word last night on whether more had followed.
Authorities in Mariupol said that some residents were forcibly moved to remote cities in Russia after being taken to camps to have their phones and documents checked. The claims made last night are yet to be verified.
The fighting was particularly heavy around the Azovstal steel plant.
“One of the largest metallurgical plants in Europe is actually being destroyed,” said Vadym Denysenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister.
Vivid details of the ordeal faced by the city’s civilian population emerged last night in the diary of a teacher. Olga Bolgova said residents had faced relentless shelling and the loss of power, water, heating and sanitation.
Extracts from her journal, published in this newspaper, describe residents having to loot shops to survive and cooking on open fires in the stairwells of their shattered residential blocks, while the dead lay unburied.
The reports of Mariupol’s anticipated fall came as Russian forces said that they had deployed a hypersonic missile to destroy an underground missile depot in western Ukraine on Friday.
It was the first time such a weapon,
which travels at 10 times the speed of sound, had been deployed in combat. Separately, it emerged that a missile strike on an army barracks in the southern city of Mykolaiv killed dozens of Ukrainian soldiers on Friday.
British defence intelligence said Russia had been forced to change its operational approach and was now pursuing a strategy of attrition.
“This is likely to involve the indiscriminate use of firepower resulting in increased civilian casualties, destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure, and intensify the humanitarian crisis,” the Ministry of Defence said yesterday.
The bodies of more than 2,500 Russian soldiers have been taken to Belarus at night to disguise the true number of casualties, Belarusian doctors reported.
Residents in the Homel, in southeastern Belarus, have told of hospital wards crammed full of “terribly disfigured” soldiers and morgues overflowing with corpses, as Russia quietly transports its wounded and dead across the border.