Ukraine: Russians try to storm Mariupol plant, strike Odesa
Kyiv: Russian forces in Ukraine tried to storm a steel plant housing soldiers and civilians in the southern city of Mariupol on Saturday while attempting to crush the last corner of resistance in a location of high symbolic and strategic value to Moscow, Ukrainian officials said.
The reported assault on the eve of Orthodox Easter came after the Kremlin claimed its military had seized all of Mariupol except for the Azovstal plant and as Russia's military pounded other cities and towns in southern and eastern Ukraine. Officials reported that Russia fired at least six cruise missiles at the Black Sea port city of Odesa, killing five people.
The fate of the Ukrainians holed up in the sprawling seaside steel mill wasn't immediately clear; earlier Saturday, a Ukrainian military unit released a video reportedly taken two days earlier in which women and children holed up underground, some for as long as two months, said they longed to see the sun.
We want to see peaceful skies, we want to breathe in fresh air, one woman in the video said. You have simply no idea what it means for us to simply eat, drink some sweetened tea. For us, it is already happiness.
As the battle for shattered Mariupol ground on, Russia claimed it had taken control of several villages elsewhere in the eastern Donbas region and destroyed 11 military Ukrainian military targets overnight, including three artillery warehouses.
Associated Press journalists also observed shelling in residential areas of Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, and in Sloviansk, a town in northern Donbas. The AP witnessed two soldiers arriving at the town's hospital, one of them fatally wounded. , while a small group of people gathered outside a church where a priest prayed and sprinkled them with water on Holy Saturday. While British officials said the Russians hadn't gained significant new ground, Ukrainian officials announced a nationwide curfew ahead of Easter Sunday, a sign of the war's disruption and threat to the entire country.
Mariupol, a part of the industrial region in eastern Ukraine known as the Donbas, has been a key Russian objective since the Feb. 24 invasion began and has taken on outsize importance in the war. Completing its capture would give Russia its biggest victory yet, after a nearly two-month siege reduced much of the city to a smoking ruin and killed an estimated 20,000 people there.
Occupying Mariupol would deprive the Ukrainians of a vital port, free up Russian troops to fight elsewhere and allow Russia to create a land corridor with the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014. An advisor to Ukraine's presidential office, Oleksiy Arestovich, said during a Saturday briefing that Russian forces had resumed air strikes on the Azovstal plant and were trying to storm it. A direct attempt to take the plant would represent a reversal from an order Russian President Vladimir Putin gave two days earlier.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reported to Putin on Thursday that the whole of Mariupol, with the exception of Azovstal, had been liberated by the Russians. At the time, Putin ordered him not to send Russian troops into the plant but instead to block off the facility, an apparent attempt to starve out the Ukrainians and force them to surrender. Ukrainian officials have estimated that about 2,000 of their troops are
inside the plant along with the civilians sheltering in the facility's underground tunnels. Arestovic said the Ukrainian
forces were trying to counter the new attacks.
