Remaining resistance fighters in Mariupol make their stand
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 said 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 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.
The defenders will “stand till the end. They only hope for a miracle. … They won’t surrender,” the Azov commander’s wife said.
The head of the United Nations said another attempt to evacuate civilians from Mariupol and the plant was underway. U.N. Secretary-general Antonio Guterres said: “We must continue to do all we can to get people out of these hellscapes.”
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.
Five people were killed in shelling of cities in the Donbas over the past 24 hours, Ukrainian officials said. The attacks damaged houses and a school.
A missile attack on the eastern city of Kramatorsk wounded 25 people and damaged over 800 apartments, two schools, a kindergarten and a medical institution, Pavlo Kyrylenko, the regional governor, said in a Telegram post. His post showed images of many buildings reduced to rubble.
Ukrainian forces said they made some gains on the border of the southern regions of Kherson and Mykolaiv and repelled 11 Russian attacks in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions that make up the Donbas.
The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said that Ukrainian forces “have largely stalled Russian advances in eastern Ukraine,” and intensified Russian airstrikes on transportation infrastructure in the western part of the country have failed to stop Western aid shipments to Ukraine.