Russia pushes deeper in Mariupol
Ukrainian official: Dozens of marines slain in rocket attack
LVIV, Ukraine — Russian forces pushed deeper into Ukraine’s besieged and battered port city of Mariupol on Saturday, where heavy fighting shut down a major steel plant and local authorities pleaded for more Western help.
The fall of Mariupol, the scene of some of the war’s worst suffering, would mark a major battlefield advance for the Russians, who are largely bogged down outside major cities more than three weeks into the biggest land invasion in Europe since World War II.
“Children, elderly people are dying. The city is destroyed and it is wiped off the face of the earth,” Mariupol police officer Michail Vershnin said from a rubblestrewn street in a video addressed to Western leaders that was authenticated by The Associated Press.
Details also began to emerge Saturday about a rocket attack that killed as many as 40 marines in the southern city of Mykolaiv on Friday, according to a Ukrainian military official.
Russian forces have cut Mariupol off from the Sea of Azov, and its fall would link Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, to territories controlled by Moscowbacked separatists in the east. It would mark a rare advance in the face of fierce Ukrainian resistance.
Ukrainian and Russian forces battled over the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, Vadym Denysenko, adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, said Saturday. “One of the largest metallurgical plants in Europe is actually being destroyed,” Denysenko said in televised remarks.
The Mariupol city council
said hours later that Russian soldiers had forcibly relocated several thousand city residents, mostly women and children, to Russia. It didn’t say where in Russia and the AP could not give immediate confirmation.
Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said the nearest forces that could assist Mariupol’s defenders were already struggling against “the overwhelming force of the enemy” or at least 60 miles away.
“There is currently no military solution to Mariupol,” he said late Friday. “That is not only my opinion, that is the opinion of the military.”
In Mykolaiv, rescuers searched the rubble of the marine barracks that was
destroyed in an apparent missile attack. The region’s governor said the marines were asleep when the attack happened.
It isn’t clear how many marines were inside the barracks when the missile struck and rescuers were still searching the rubble for survivors Saturday. But a senior Ukrainian military official who spoke to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity estimated that as many as 40 marines were killed, which would make it one of the deadliest known attacks on Ukrainian forces of the war.
Zelenskyy has remained defiant, appearing in a video early Saturday that was shot on the streets of the capital, Kyiv.
He said Russia is trying
to starve Ukraine’s cities into submission but warned that continuing the invasion would exact a heavy toll on Russia.
U.N. bodies have confirmed more than 847 civilian deaths since the war began, though they concede the actual toll is likely much higher. The U.N. says more than 3.3 million people have fled Ukraine as refugees.
Waiting to board a bus at a triage center near the Moldova-Ukraine border on Saturday, a Ukrainian woman named Irina said she decided to leave home in Mykolaiv this week after a loud explosion shook the walls, waking her young daughter.
“Can you imagine the fear I had, not for me but for my child?” said Irina, who didn’t provide her last name. “So we made decision to arrive here, but I don’t know where we are going, where we’ll stay.”
Ukrainian and Russian officials agreed to establish 10 humanitarian corridors for bringing aid in and residents out of besieged cities — one from Mariupol and several around Kyiv and in the eastern Luhansk region, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said Saturday.
She also announced plans to deliver humanitarian aid to the southern city of Kherson, which Russia seized early in the war.
Ukraine and Russia have held several rounds of negotiations aimed at ending the conflict but remain divided over several issues, with Russia pressing for its neighbor’s demilitarization and
Kyiv demanding security guarantees.
Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke by phone Saturday with Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel, the second time they talked last week. According to the Kremlin’s readout of the call, Putin “outlined fundamental assessments of the course of the talks between Russian and Ukrainian representatives,” while Bettel informed him about “contacts with the leadership of Ukraine and other countries.”
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, during a Saturday visit to NATO ally Bulgaria, said the Russian invasion had “stalled on a number of fronts” but the U.S. had not yet seen signs that Putin was deploying additional forces.