Desperate battle rages at Mariupol holdout
LVIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian fighters in the tunnels underneath Mariupol’s pulverized steel plant held out against Russian troops Thursday in an increasingly desperate and perhaps doomed effort to deny Moscow what would be its biggest success of the war yet: the full capture of the strategic port city.
The bloody battle came amid growing speculation that President Vladimir Putin wants to present the Russian people with a battlefield triumph — 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 at Mariupol’s sprawling Azovstal steelworks, 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.
Kateryna Prokopenko, the wife of Azov Regiment commander Denys Prokopenko, a leader of the steel plant’s defenders, said that in a call with her husband from inside, he told her he would love her forever.
“I am going mad from this. It seemed like words of goodbye,”
she said.
Capt. Sviatoslav Palamar, deputy commander of the regiment, told Ukrainian TV that Russian troops were inside the plant for a third day and were meeting fierce resistance. “Heavy fighting is underway,” he 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.
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 to fight elsewhere in the Donbas, the eastern industrial region that the Kremlin says is now its chief objective.
Palamar pleaded for the evacuation of civilians and wounded fighters from the steelworks, saying soldiers were “dying in agony due to the lack of proper treatment.”
The Kremlin has demanded the troops surrender. They have refused. Russia has also accused them of preventing the civilians from leaving.
The defenders will “stand till the end. They only hope for a miracle . ... They won’t surrender,” the Azov commander’s wife said.
Secretary-general Antonio Guterres told the U.N. Security Council on Thursday that a third evacuation is taking place and U.N. humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths said its aim is to evacuate more civilians from Mariupol and the steel plant.
Guterres said 101 civilians were evacuated from the plant along with 59 more from a neighboring area in the first operation that ended Tuesday. He said that in the second operation, which was completed Wednesday night, more than 320 civilians were evacuated from the city of Mariupol and surrounding areas.
But many previous attempts to open safe corridors from Mariupol have fallen through, with Ukraine blaming shelling and firing by the Russians.
Meanwhile, 10 weeks into the 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.
In other developments, Belarus’ authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, defended Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but
said he didn’t expect the conflict to “drag on this way.”
Lukashenko, whose country was used by the Russians as a launch pad for the invasion, said Moscow had to act because Kyiv was “provoking” Russia.
But he also created some distance between himself and the Kremlin, repeatedly calling for an end to the conflict and referring to it
as a “war” — a term Moscow refuses to use. It insists on calling the fighting a “special military operation.”