Dozens rescued at steel plant
Biden OKs another $150M in military help for nation
ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine — Dozens more civilians were rescued Friday from the tunnels under the besieged steel plant where Ukrainian fighters in Mariupol have been making their last stand to prevent Moscow’s complete takeover of the strategically important port city.
Russian and Ukrainian officials said 50 people were evacuated from the Azovstal steel plant and handed over to representatives of the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross. The Russian military said the group included 11 children.
Russian officials and Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said evacuation efforts would continue Saturday. The latest evacuees were in addition to roughly 500 other civilians who got out of the plant and city in recent days.
The fight for the last Ukrainian stronghold in a city reduced to ruins by the Russian onslaught appeared increasingly desperate amid growing speculation that President 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, the biggest patriotic holiday on the Russian calendar.
As the holiday commemorating the Soviet Union’s World War II victory over Nazi Germany approached, cities across Ukraine prepared for an expected increase in Russian attacks and officials urged residents to heed air raid warnings.
“These symbolic dates are to the Russian aggressor like red to a bull,” said Ukraine’s first deputy interior minister, Yevhen Yenin.
“While the entire civilized world remembers the victims of terrible wars on these days, the Russian Federation wants parades and is preparing to dance over bones in Mariupol.”
Also on Friday, U.S. President Joe Biden authorized the shipment of another $150 million in military assistance to Ukraine.
Biden said the latest spending means his administration has “nearly exhausted” what Congress authorized for Ukraine in March and called on lawmakers to approve a more than $33 billion spending package that will last through September.
A U.S. official said the latest tranche of assistance includes artillery rounds, counter-artillery radars and jamming equipment.
There are roughly 2,000 Ukrainian fighters, by Russia’s most recent estimate, holed up in the vast maze of tunnels and bunkers beneath the Azovstal steelworks, and they have repeatedly refused to surrender. Ukrainian officials said before Friday’s evacuations that a few hundred civilians were also trapped there, and fears for their safety have increased.
Kateryna Prokopenko, whose husband, Denys Prokopenko, commands the Azov Regiment troops inside the plant, issued a plea to also spare the fighters.
She said they would be willing to go to a third country to wait out the war but would never surrender to Russia because that would mean “filtration camps, prison, torture and death.”
If nothing is done to save her husband and his men, they will “stand to the end without surrender,” she said Friday.
U.N. officials have been tight-lipped about the evacuation efforts, but it seemed likely that the latest evacuees would be taken to Zaporizhzhia, a Ukrainian-controlled city about 140 miles northwest of Mariupol.
Some of the plant’s previous evacuees spoke to the AP about the horrors of being surrounded by death in the moldy underground bunker with little food and water, poor medical care and diminishing hope.
“People literally rot like our jackets did,” said Serhii Kuzmenko, 31, who fled with his wife, 8-yearold daughter and four others from their bunker, where 30 others were left behind. “They need our help badly.”
Fighters defending the plant said Friday on Telegram that Russian troops had fired on an evacuation vehicle on the plant’s grounds. They said the car was moving toward civilians when it was hit by shelling, and that one soldier was killed and six were wounded.
Moscow did not immediately acknowledge renewed fighting there Friday.
Russia took control of Mariupol, aside from the steel plant, after bombarding it for two months. Ahead of Victory Day, workers and volunteers cleaned up what remains of the city, which had a prewar population of over 400,000.
Perhaps 100,000 civilians remain with little food, water, electricity or heat. Bulldozers scooped up debris and people swept streets against a backdrop of hollowedout buildings as workers repaired a model of a warship and Russian flags were hoisted.
Asked whether Russia would soon take full control of Mariupol, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said: “Mariupol will never fall. I’m not talking about heroism or anything.
“It is already devastated,” he told a meeting at London’s Chatham House think tank.