The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mariupol steel mill battle still rages
Russian forces attempt to complete capture of strategically vital port.
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 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.
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 in 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.
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.
And the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia, a key transit point for evacuees from Mariupol, announced a curfew from Sunday evening through Tuesday morning.
In other developments, Belarus’ authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, defended Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in an interview with The Associated Press but said he didn’t expect the conflict to “drag on this way.”
Lukashenko, whose country was used by the Russians as a launchpad 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 it a “special military operation.”
Mariupol, which had a prewar population of over 400,000, has come to symbolize the misery inflicted by the war. The siege of the city has trapped perhaps 100,000 civilians with little food, water, medicine or heat.