UKRAINE’S EASTER EVE MISERY AHEAD OF U.S. VISIT
Secretaries of state, defense to meet with Zelenskyy; officials say 3-month-old among 8 dead in Odesa as Russians storm holdout steel plant in Mariupol
KYIV, Ukraine — Russian forces in Ukraine tried to storm a steel plant housing soldiers and civilians in the southern city of Mariupol on Saturday in an attempt to crush the last pocket of resistance in a place of deep symbolic and strategic value to Moscow, Ukrainian officials said.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, meanwhile, announced he would meet Sunday in his nation’s capital with the U.S. secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and the U.S. secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin. The White House declined comment.
Speaking in a news conference, Zelenskyy gave little detail about logistics of the encounter but said he expected concrete results — “not just presents or some kind of cakes, we are expecting specific things and specific weapons.”
It would be the first high-level U.S. trip to Kyiv since the war began Feb. 24. While visiting Poland in March, Blinken stepped briefly onto Ukrainian soil to meet with the country’s foreign minister. Zelenskyy’s last face-to-face meeting with a U.S. leader was Feb. 19 with Vice President Kamala Harris.
In attacks on the eve of Orthodox Easter, Russian forces pounded cities and towns in southern and eastern Ukraine.
A 3-month-old baby was among eight people killed when Russia fired cruise missiles at the Black Sea port city of Odesa, officials said. Zelenskyy said 18 more were wounded.
“The war started when this baby was one month old. Can you imagine what is happening?” Zelenskyy said. “They are just bastards . ... I don’t have any other words for it.’’
The fate of the Ukrainians in the sprawling and beseiged seaside steel mill in Mariupol, where Russia says its forces have taken the rest of the city, wasn’t immediately clear. Earlier Saturday, a Ukrainian military unit released a video reportedly taken two days earlier in which women and children holed up underground, some for as long as two months, said they longed to see the sun.
“We want to see peaceful skies, we want to breathe in fresh air,” one woman in the video said.
Mariupol has been a key Russian objective and has taken on outsize importance in the war. Completing its capture would give Russia its biggest victory yet, after a nearly two-month siege reduced much of the city to a smoking ruin.
It would deprive Ukrainian of a vital port, free up Russian troops to fight elsewhere and establish a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow seized in 2014. Russia-backed separatists control parts of the Donbas.
An adviser to Ukraine’s presidential office, Oleksiy Arestovich, said Russian forces resumed airstrikes on the Azovstal plant and were also trying to storm it, in an apparent reversal of tactics. Two days earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin had given an order not to send troops in but instead to blockade the plant.
Ukrainian officials have estimated that about 2,000 of their troops are inside the plant along with civilians sheltering in its underground tunnels.
More than 100,000 people — down from a prewar population of about 430,000 — are believed to remain in Mariupol with scant food, water or heat. Ukrainian authorities estimate that over 20,000 civilians have been killed in the city.
Yet another attempt to evacuate women, children and older adults from Mariupol failed Saturday. Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to Mariupol’s mayor, said Russian forces did not allow Ukrainian-organized buses to take residents to Zaporizhzhia, a city 141 miles to the northwest.
“At 11 o’clock, at least 200 Mariupol residents gathered near the Port City shopping center, waiting for evacuation,” Andryushchenko posted on the Telegram messaging app. “The Russian military drove up to the Mariupol residents and ordered them to disperse, because now there will be shelling.”
Russia said it took control of several villages elsewhere in the eastern Donbas region and destroyed 11 Ukrainian military targets overnight, including three artillery warehouses. Russian attacks also struck populated areas. British officials, however, said Russian forces had not gained significant new ground.
Ukrainian officials announced a nationwide curfew ahead of Easter Sunday.
In the attack on Odesa, Russian troops fired at least six missiles, according to Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister.
“Residents of the city heard explosions in different areas,” Gerashchenko said via Telegram. “Residential buildings were hit. It is already known about one victim. He burned in his car in a courtyard of one of the buildings.”