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Kyiv: The shattered port city of Mariupol was on the brink of falling to the Russians on Sunday after almost seven weeks under siege.
The Russian military estimated that 2500 Ukrainian fighters were holding out at a hulking steel plant with a warren of underground passageways – the last remaining pocket of resistance in Mariupol.
A body of a civilian lies next to a damaged car in an area controlled by Russian-backed separatist forces in Mariupol.Credit:AP
Moscow set a midday deadline for their surrender, saying those who laid down their arms were “guaranteed to keep their lives.” The defenders rejected the ultimatum, just as they had rejected all previous ultimatums.
“We will fight absolutely to the end, to the win, in this war,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal told American audiences when interviewed on the ABC’s This Week.
He said Ukraine was prepared to end the war through diplomacy if possible, “but we do not have an intention to surrender.”
An elderly local resident speaks to a journalist near a destroyed part of the Illich iron and steel works in Mariupol on Saturday.Credit:AP
The capture of Mariupol would free up Russian forces to join an expected all-out offensive for control of the Donbas, the industrial region in the country’s east where the Kremlin has focused its ambitions after abandoning – for now at least – any attempt to take Kyiv.
The relentless bombardment and street fighting in Mariupol have left much of the city pulverised, leaving an estimated 21,000 people dead.
Some 100,000 people out of a prewar population of 450,000 remained trapped in the city on Sunday without food, water, heat or electricity in a siege that has made Mariupol the scene of the some of the worst suffering of the war.
“All those who will continue resistance will be destroyed,” Major General Igor Konashenkov, the Russian Defence Ministry’s spokesman, said in announcing the latest ultimatum.
A Russian military convoy near Mariupol on Saturday. Mariupol, a strategic port on the Sea of Azov, has been resisting Russian troops for almost seven weeks.Credit:AP
He said intercepted communications indicated there were about 400 foreign mercenaries along with the Ukrainian troops at the Azovstal steel mill, a claim that could not be independently verified.
Ukrainian Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Malyar described Mariupol as a “shield defending Ukraine” as Russian troops prepare for the battle in the Donbas, where Moscow-backed separatists already control some territory.
In a reminder that no part of Ukraine is safe, Russian forces carried out missile strikes on Sunday near Kyiv and in Kharkiv, the country’s second city.
After the humiliating loss of its flagship Black Sea ship to a Ukrainian missile attack, Russia’s military had vowed on Friday to step up strikes on the capital.
The Kremlin said on Sunday that it had attacked an ammunition plant near Kyiv with precision-guided missiles, the third such strike in as many days.
Russia also claimed to have destroyed Ukrainian air defence radar equipment in the east, near Sievierodonetsk, as well as several ammunition depots elsewhere.
Explosions were reported in Kramatorsk, the eastern city where rockets earlier this month killed at least 57 people at a train station crowded with civilians trying to evacuate ahead of the Russian offensive.
Capturing Mariupol would be Russia’s biggest victory after two months of costly fighting and could help reassure the Russian public amid a worsening economic situation resulting from Western sanctions.
It would allow Russia to secure a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula, which it annexed from Ukraine in 2014, and deprive Ukraine of a major port and its prized industrial assets.
Mariupol’s final stand
Mariupol’s seizure also would make more troops available for the offensive in the east, which, if successful, would give Russian President Vladimir Putin a vital piece of the country and a badly needed victory that he could sell to the Russian people.
Tunnels at the sprawling Azovstal steel mill have allowed the defenders to hide and resist.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the fall of Mariupol could scuttle any attempt at a negotiated peace.
“The destruction of all our guys in Mariupol – what they are doing now – can put an end to any format of negotiations,” Zelensky said in an interview with Ukrainian journalists.
In his nightly address to the nation, Zelensky called on the West to send more heavy weapons to help save the city.
Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer, who met with Putin in Moscow last week – the first European leader to do so since the invasion February 24 – said the Russian president was “in his own war logic” on Ukraine.
In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press on US TV, Nehammer said he thinks Putin believes he is winning the war, and “we have to look in his eyes and we have to confront him with that, what we see in Ukraine.”
Ukrainian servicemen run for cover as explosions are heard during a Russian attack in Kharkiv on Sunday.Credit:AP
Like Mariupol, the north-eastern city of Kharkiv has been a target of attacks since the early days of the invasion and has seen conditions deteriorate ahead of the eastern offensive.
At least five people were killed and 13 wounded in Russian shelling of Kharkiv on Sunday, regional officials said.
The barrage slammed into apartment buildings and left the streets scattered with broken glass and other debris.
AP
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