Battle for Mariupol steel plant rages
Heavy fighting raged Thursday at the shattered steel plant in Mariupol as Russian forces sought to finish off the city’s last-ditch defenders and complete the capture of the strategically vital Ukrainian port.
The bloody battle came amid growing speculation that 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. That is the biggest patriotic holiday on the Russian calendar, marking the Soviet Union’s triumph over Nazi Germany.
Some 2,000 Ukrainian fighters, by Russia’s most recent estimate, were holed up in the tunnels and bunkers under the sprawling Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol,
the last pocket of resistance in a city largely reduced to rubble over the past two months. A few hundred civilians were also believed trapped there.
Capt. Sviatoslav Palamar, who as deputy commander of Ukraine’s Azov Regiment led defenders inside the mill, told Ukrainian TV that Russian troops were inside the plant for a third day and
meeting fierce resistance.
“Heavy fighting is underway,” Palamar said.
The Russians managed to get inside with the help of an electrician who knew the layout, said Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s Internal Affairs Ministry.
“He showed them the underground tunnels which are leading to the factory,”
Gerashchenko said in a video posted late Wednesday. “Yesterday, the Russians started storming these tunnels, using the information they received from the betrayer.”
The Kremlin denied its troops were storming the plant.
Mariupol’s fall would be a major success for Moscow, depriving Ukraine of a vital port, allowing Russia to establish a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014, and freeing up troops to fight elsewhere in the Donbas, the eastern industrial region that the Kremlin says is now its chief objective.
Palamar pleaded with the world to pressure Russia into allowing more civilians to be rescued from the steelworks along with wounded fighters. About 100 civilians were evacuated over the weekend.
“Wounded soldiers are dying in agony due to the lack of proper treatment,” he said via video.
The Kremlin has demanded the fighters surrender. They have refused. Russia has also accused them of preventing the civilians from leaving.
Kateryna Prokopenko, the wife of Azov Regiment commander Denys Prokopenko, said that without an evacuation operation by European leaders, the troops inside will die.
“They stand till the end. They only hope for a miracle . ... They won’t surrender,” she said. She said that in a call with her husband, he said he would love her forever.
“I am going mad from this. It seemed like words of goodbye,” she said. “They have held out too long and deserve to be saved.”
Meanwhile, 10 weeks into the devastating war, Ukraine’s military claimed it recaptured some areas in the south and repelled other attacks in the east, further frustrating Putin’s ambitions after his abortive attempt to seize Kyiv. Ukrainian and Russian forces are fighting village by village.
The head of Britain’s armed forces, Chief of the Defense Staff Adm. Tony Radakin, said Putin is “trying to rush to a tactical victory” before Victory Day. But he said Russian forces are struggling to gain momentum in the Donbas.
Radakin told British broadcaster Talk TV that Russia is using missiles and weapons at such a rate that it is in a “logistics war” to keep supplied. He added: “This is going to be a hard slog.”
Fearful of new attacks surrounding Victory Day, the mayor of the western Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk urged residents to leave for the countryside over the long weekend and warned them not to gather in public places.