Defenders repel attacks on steel mill in Mariupol
LVIV, Ukraine — Heavy fighting raged Thursday at the shattered steel plant in Mariupol as Russian forces attempted to finish off the city’s lastditch defenders and complete the capture of the strategically vital port.
The bloody battle came amid growing suspicions 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.
Ten 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, as Moscow struggles to gain momentum in the Donbas, the eastern industrial heartland that the Kremlin says is now its chief objective.
In the most searing example of how Ukrainian forces have slowed Russia’s progress, Ukrainian fighters — 2,000, by the Russians’ estimate in recent weeks — 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 inside the plant.
Ukraine said its fighters drove back a Russian thrust on the plant, which was also being heavily bombed from above. Videos shared online appeared to show the steel mill targeted by intense shelling at dawn.
“The Russian troops entered the territory of Azovstal but were kicked out by our defenders,” Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said on Ukrainian television. “We can say that the fighting is ongoing.”
The Kremlin denied its troops were storming the plant.
A Ukrainian officer leading defenders inside the last Mariupol bastion pleaded with the world to pressure Russia into allowing more civilians to be rescued along with wounded troops. About 100 civilians were evacuated over the weekend.
“Wounded soldiers are dying in agony due to the lack of proper treatment,” Capt. Sviatoslav Palamar, deputy commander of the Azov Regiment, said in a video statement.
Mariupol’s fall would be a major battlefield 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.
Some analysts have suggested Putin may use Victory Day to expand what he calls the “special military operation” and declare all-out war. That would allow the Russian leader to introduce martial law and mobilize reservists to make up for significant troop losses. The Kremlin has dismissed such speculation.
Mariupol, which had a prewar population of over 400,000, has come to symbolize the misery inflicted by the war.