The battered port city of Mariupol appeared on the brink of falling to Russian forces on Sunday, after seven weeks under siege, a development that would give Moscow a crucial success in Ukraine following Russia’s failure to storm the capital and the loss of its Black Sea flagship.
The Russian military estimated that about 2,500 Ukrainian fighters holding out at a hulking steel plant with a warren of underground passageways provided the last pocket of resistance in Mariupol.
Russia gave a deadline for their surrender, saying those who put down their weapons were “guaranteed to keep their lives”, but the Ukrainians did not submit.
“All those who will continue resistance will be destroyed,” Maj Gen Igor Konashenkov, the Russian defence ministry’s spokesman, said.
He said intercepted communications indicated there were about 400 foreign mercenaries with the Ukrainian troops at the Azovstal steel mill, a claim that could not be independently verified.
Ukrainian prime minister Denys Shmyhal said on ABC’s This Week: “We will fight absolutely to the end, to the win, in this war.
He said Ukraine is prepared to end the war through diplomacy, if possible, “but we do not have intention to surrender”.
Seizing Mariupol would free Russian forces to weaken and encircle Ukrainian forces in eastern Ukraine, where Russia has focused its war aims for now and is deploying personnel and equipment withdrawn from the north after a botched attempt to take Kyiv.
Ukrainian deputy defence minister Hanna Malyar described Mariupol as a “shield defending Ukraine” as Russian troops prepare for a full-scale offensive in Donbas, the country’s eastern industrial heartland where Moscow-backed separatists already control some territory.
In a reminder that no part of Ukraine was immune until the war ends, Russian forces carried out new missile strikes on Sunday near Kyiv and elsewhere in an apparent effort to weaken Ukraine’s military capacity before the anticipated assault in the east.
After the humiliating loss of the flagship of its Black Sea Fleet, Russia’s military command vowed Friday to step up missile strikes on the capital.
The Russian military said Sunday that it had attacked an ammunition plant near Kyiv overnight with precision-guided missiles, the third such strike in as many days.
Russia renewed attacks on Kyiv after accusing Ukrainian forces of airstrikes on Russian territory that wounded seven people and damaged about 100 residential buildings in Bryansk, a region bordering Ukraine. Ukrainian officials have not confirmed hitting targets in Russia.
Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said a strike on Saturday on what Russia’s defence ministry identified as an armoured vehicle plant killed one person and wounded several. He advised residents who fled the city earlier in the war not to return.
The Russian military also claimed Sunday to have destroyed Ukrainian air defence radars in the east, near Sievierodonetsk, as well as several ammunition depots elsewhere.
Explosions were reported overnight in Kramatorsk, an eastern city where rockets killed at least 57 people at a train station crowded with civilians trying to evacuate before the expected Russian offensive.
The ongoing siege and relentless bombardment of Mariupol has come at a terrible cost, with officials estimating Russians had killed at least 21,000 people. Just 120,000 people remain in the city, out of a pre-war population of 450,000.
Malyar, the deputy defence minister, said the Russians have continued to hit Mariupol with airstrikes and could be getting ready for an amphibious landing to beef up their ground forces.
Capturing the city would mark Russia’s first palpable success after two months of fighting and help reassure the Russian public amid the worsening economic situation 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 prized industrial assets.
Mariupol’s seizure also would make more troops available for a new offensive in the east, which if successful, would give Russian president Vladimir Putin a position of strength from which to pressure Ukraine into making concessions.
So far, tunnels at the sprawling Azovstal steel mill, which covers an area of more than 4.2 square miles, have allowed the defenders to hide and resist until they run out of ammunition.
With Russia apparently poised to declare victory, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said the city’s fall could scupper 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,” Mr Zelensky said in an interview with Ukrainian journalists.
In his nightly address to the nation, Mr Zelensky called on the west to send more heavy weapons immediately if there is any chance of saving the city, adding Russia “is deliberately trying to destroy everyone who is there”.
Austrian chancellor Karl Nehammer, who met Mr Putin in Moscow this week, the first European leader to do so since the invasion began on February 24, said the Russian president is “in his own war logic” on Ukraine.
In an interview on NBC’s Meet The Press, Mr 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”.
Like Mariupol, the north-east city of Kharkiv has been an ongoing target of Russian aggression since the early days of the invasion and has seen conditions deteriorate ahead of the eastern offensive.
Multiple rockets struck the centre of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, on Sunday, according to Associated Press journalists who were there. At least two people were killed and four others were injured, though the scale of the attack suggested the toll could rise.
The barrage slammed into blocks of flats and left broken glass, debris and the part of at least one rocket scattered on the street. Firefighters and residents scrambled to douse flames in several buildings that caught fire.
Mr Zelensky estimated that 2,500 to 3,000 Ukrainian troops have died in the war, and about 10,000 have been wounded. The office of Ukraine’s prosecutor general said Saturday that at least 200 children have been killed, and more than 360 wounded.
Pope Francis made an anguished Easter Sunday plea for peace in the “senseless” war in Ukraine.
“May there be peace for war-torn Ukraine, so sorely tried by the violence and destruction of this cruel and senseless war into which it was dragged,” Francis said, without mentioning Mr Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine.
“Please, please, let us not get used to war,” Francis said.
