The shattered port city of Mariupol was on the verge of falling by Russian forces on Sunday after seven weeks of siege, which will give Moscow decisive success after its failure to storm the Ukrainian capital and sink its flagship in the Black Sea.
The Russian military estimates that 2,500 Ukrainian fighters are trapped in a huge steel mine with a maze of underground passages in the last pocket of resistance in Mariupol.
Moscow has set a lunch deadline for their surrender, saying those who have laid down their arms are “guaranteed to save their lives”. But the defenders did not obey, just as they rejected previous ultimatums.
Read more: Russia warns Ukraine to lay down arms in Mariupol “to stop all hostilities”
“We will fight to the end, to victory in this war,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Denis Shmihal promised on ABC’s This Week. He said Ukraine was ready to end the war through diplomacy if possible, “but we have no intention of surrendering.”
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The capture of Mariupol would free Russian forces to join the expected full-scale offensive to control Donbass, the industrial region in the east where the Kremlin has concentrated its military goals, after abandoning all attempts to capture Kyiv, the capital.
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The relentless bombing and street fighting in Mariupol left much of the city in the dust, killing at least 21,000 people, according to Ukrainians. A maternity hospital was hit by a deadly Russian air strike in the first weeks of the war, and about 300 people were killed in the bombing of a theater where civilians were hiding.
Approximately 100,000 of the pre-war population of 450,000 remained in the city, trapped without food, water, heat or electricity during a siege that made Mariupol the scene of some of the war’s worst suffering.
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“All those who will continue the resistance will be destroyed,” said Major General Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry, announcing the latest ultimatum.
He said intercepted communications indicated that there were about 400 foreign mercenaries, along with Ukrainian troops, at the Azovstal steel plant, a statement that could not be verified independently.
Read more: Ukrainian Zelensky said the situation in Mariupol remains extremely difficult
Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hana Malyar described Mariupol as a “shield defending Ukraine” as Russian troops prepare for the battle in Donbass, where Moscow-backed separatists already control part of the territory.
As a reminder that no part of Ukraine is safe, Russian forces launched missile strikes near Kyiv and elsewhere in an apparent effort to weaken Ukraine’s military capacity ahead of the expected attack.
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Following the humiliating loss of its Black Sea Fleet’s flagship to a rocket attack that Ukrainians boasted about, the Russian military promised on Friday to step up strikes on the capital. The Kremlin said on Sunday that it had attacked an ammunition factory near Kyiv at night with precision missiles, the third such strike in so many days.
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Russia also claims to have destroyed Ukrainian air defense radar equipment in the east, near Severodonetsk, as well as several ammunition depots elsewhere.
Explosions were reported overnight in Kramatorsk, the eastern city, where rockets earlier this month killed at least 57 people at a station crowded with civilians trying to evacuate before the Russian offensive.
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A regional official in eastern Ukraine said at least two people were killed when Russian forces opened fire on apartment buildings in the town of Zolote, near the Donbass front line.
Malyar, the deputy defense minister, said the Russians continued to launch air strikes on Mariupol and could prepare for a landing to strengthen their ground forces.
The takeover of the city would be Russia’s biggest victory in two months of costly fighting and could help reassure the Russian public amid deteriorating economic conditions from Western sanctions.
This will allow Russia to provide a land corridor to the Crimean peninsula, which it annexed from Ukraine in 2014, and deprive Ukraine of a major port and its valuable industrial assets.
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The conquest of Mariupol will also provide more troops for the offensive in the east, which, if successful, will give Russian President Vladimir Putin a vital part of the country and a much-needed victory that he can sell to the Russian people.
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The tunnels at the extensive Azovstal steel plant, which covers more than 11 square kilometers (over 4.2 square miles), allowed defenders to hide and resist.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the fall of Mariupol could hamper any attempt at peace through negotiations.
“The destruction of all our boys in Mariupol – what they are doing now – could put an end to any format of negotiations,” Zelensky said in an interview with Ukrainian journalists.
Read more: That’s why Russia is after Mariupol – and why it may not be the change in the game it once was
In a nightly address to the nation, Zelensky called on the West to send more heavy weapons immediately if there is any chance of saving the city, adding that Russia was “deliberately trying to destroy everyone there.”
Austrian Chancellor Karl Nechamer, who met with Putin in Moscow this week – the first European leader to do so since the February 24 invasion – said the Russian president was “in his own military logic” for Ukraine.
In an interview with NBC’s Nehamer Press, he said he thought Putin believed he was winning the war, and “we need to look him in the eye and confront him with what we see in Ukraine.”
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Like Mariupol, the northeastern city of Kharkiv has been under attack since the first days of the invasion and has seen conditions deteriorate before the eastern offensive.
At least five people were killed and 13 wounded in a Russian shelling of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, on Sunday, regional authorities said.
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The barrage crashed into apartment buildings, leaving the streets scattered with broken glass and other debris, including part of at least one rocket. Firefighters and residents are fighting to put out the flames in several apartments.
Zelensky estimated that between 2,500 and 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers died in the war.
Against the backdrop of the fighting, Zelensky spoke in his evening address about Ukraine’s plans for a memorial, “to remind all generations of our people of the brutal and senseless invasion that Ukraine managed to repel.”
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Pope Francis has made a tortured Easter plea for peace in the “senseless” war in Ukraine.
“May there be peace for war-torn Ukraine, so severely affected by the violence and destruction of this brutal and senseless war in which it was involved,” Francis said, without mentioning Putin’s decision to invade.
“Please, please, let’s not get used to the war,” Francis said.
Chernov reported from Kharkov. Yesica Fisch of Kramatorsk, Ukraine, and journalists from the Associated Press around the world contributed to this report.
© 2022 The Canadian Press
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