mariupol: Russia tries to storm Mariupol plant to take on ‘last fighters’ – Times of India

KYIV: Russia resumed its assault on the last Ukrainian defenders holed up in a giant steel works in Mariupol, a Ukrainian official said on Saturday, days after Moscow declared victory in the southern port city and said its forces did not need to take the plant. Russian forces were hitting the Azovstal complex with air strikes and trying to storm it, presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych said, adding “the enemy is trying to strangle the final resistance of Mariupol’s defenders”.
The biggest battle of the conflict has raged for weeks as Russia seeks to capture a city seen as vital to its attempts to link the eastern Donbas region with Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that Moscow seized in 2014. Two missiles struck a military facility and two residential buildings in the Black Sea port city of Odesa, and two more were destroyed, the southern air command of the Ukrainian armed forces said. Ukrainian presidential aide said six people, including an infact, had been killed and 18 wounded. Russia said the military depot targeted was stocking foreign weapons. The missile attack on Odesa comes a day after a Russian general outlined what appeared to be a broad new set of military objectives, including the seizure of all Ukrainian lands along the Black Sea, including Odesa.
Russian forces have besieged and bombarded Mariupol since the early days of the war, leaving a city that is usually home to over 400,000 people in ruins. A new attempt to evacuate civilians failed on Saturday, an official said. Russia’s defence ministry said on Fri- day Mariupol’s last fighters had been “securely blockaded” at the steel plant. On Thursday, President Vladimir Putin had declared the city “liberated”, declaring that troops would not storm Azovstal.
Arestovych, a political adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky, said Ukrainian troops in the Azovstal complex were still holding out “despite the very difficult situation” and were attempting counterattacks. Over 1,000 civilians are also in the plant, according to Ukrainian authorities. The Azov battalion, a nationalist militia prominent in the defence of Mariupol, released a video which it said showed women and children sheltering in the complex. “I want to see the sun,” one unnamed boy in the video said. Russia’s current offensive is focused on the Donbas, where Moscow-backed separatists have for years held parts of its constituent Donetsk and Luhansk regions. On Saturday, Luhansk governor Serhiy Gaidai said Ukrainian forces were pulling back from some settlements to new defensive lines to preserve their units in the face of an intensifying barrage on all cities in the region.
The governor of Kharkiv, a heavily bombarded city northwest of Donbas, said Russian forces had carried out over 50 artillery or rocket attacks in the area over the past day, killing two and wounding 19. Russia said it had shot down a Ukrainian fighter jet and destroyed three Ukrainian helicopters at an airfield in Kharkiv. British military intelligence, however, said Russian forces had made no big gains in the last 24 hours.