Kyiv, Ukraine (AP) – Russian troops are pushing for an offensive in the eastern region of Donbass in a bid to take over Ukraine’s industrial center, but have made little progress as fierce Ukrainian counterattacks have delayed efforts, Ukrainian and British officials said on Saturday. .
Russia continues to fight for full control of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions that make up Donbass and seeks to secure a “land route between those territories and occupied Crimea,” including by destroying the last pockets of resistance in the besieged port city of Mariupol. the General Staff of Ukraine.
In the last 24 hours, Ukrainian forces repulsed eight Russian attacks in the two regions, destroying 9 tanks, 18 armored units and 13 vehicles, a tanker and three artillery systems, the General Staff said.
“The honors of the Russian occupiers are regrouping. “Russia’s enemy continues to launch missile and bomb strikes on military and civilian infrastructure,” the General Staff said on its Facebook page.
Luhansk Governor Sergei Haidai said on Saturday that two people had died in a Russian shelling in the town of Popasna.
He said an evacuation train for Donetsk and Luhansk residents was expected to leave the eastern city of Pokrovsk for the western city of Chop, near Ukraine’s border with Slovakia and Hungary, on Saturday.
“In addition to the fact that the street fights in the city have been going on for several weeks, the Russian army is constantly shelling high-rise apartment buildings and private houses,” Haidai wrote in an Instagram message. “Only yesterday, locals withstood five enemy artillery attacks … Not all survived.”
The British Ministry of Defense said that despite their increased activity, “Russian forces have not achieved significant success in the last 24 hours, as Ukrainian counterattacks continue to hamper efforts.”
Russia has not yet established air or naval control due to Ukrainian resistance, and despite declaring President Vladimir Putin’s victory in Mariupol, “heavy fighting continues, thwarting Russian attempts to take the city, further slowing desired progress in Donbass,” they said. from the Ministry of Defense.
Ukrainian authorities again tried on Saturday to evacuate women, children and the elderly from Mariupol after many previous attempts failed. The effort was to begin at noon, “if all goes according to plan,” Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk told the Telegram news agency.
Russia has withdrawn a dozen troops from Mariupol to step up the offensive elsewhere in Donbass, while other troops continue to keep the rest of Ukraine’s troops in the city at the Azovstal steel plant, the last remaining fortress, Ukrainian officials said.
Putin is said to have ordered his forces not to storm the plant to finish off the defenders, but instead to seal it in an apparent attempt to force them to surrender.
Russian forces are hitting 2,000 Ukrainian fighters who are still hiding inside, the mayor’s office said on Friday.
“Every day they drop several bombs on Azovstal,” said Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to the mayor of Mariupol. “The fighting, the shelling, the bombing doesn’t stop.”
Mariupol has been largely reduced to smoldering ruins by weeks of bombing, and Russian state television has shown the flag of pro-Moscow separatists in Donetsk, hoisted at the city’s highest point, its TV tower. He also showed that the main building of the Azovstal steel plant was on fire.
Under cover of darkness, Ukrainian forces have managed to deliver weapons to the besieged steel plants by helicopter, said Alexei Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council.
In total, the Kremlin has thrown more than 100,000 troops and mercenaries from Syria and Libya into the battle in Ukraine and has more forces in the country every day, Danilov said.
“We have a difficult situation, but our army is defending our country,” he said.
Mariupol gained great importance in the war. Its takeover will deprive Ukrainians of a vital port and complete the land corridor between Russia and the Crimean peninsula that Putin took from Ukraine in 2014.
It would also allow Putin to throw more of his energy into the potentially culminating battle for Donbass and its coal mines, factories and other industries, or what the Kremlin has now declared its main goal.
The latest satellite images from Maxar Technologies have revealed something that seems to be the second place for a mass grave near Mariupol. The site at the Vinogradne cemetery has several newly dug parallel trenches about 40 meters (131 feet) long, Maksar said in a statement.
A day earlier, Maxar released photos of what appeared to be row after row of more than 200 freshly excavated mass graves next to a cemetery in the town of Manchush, near Mariupol. This provoked Ukrainian accusations that the Russians were trying to cover up the massacre of civilians in the city.
“This reaffirms that the occupiers are organizing the collection, burial and cremation of the dead in every district of the city,” Andryushchenko told the Telegram news app.
Ukrainians have estimated that the graves seen in photos released Thursday could contain 9,000 bodies.
The Kremlin did not respond to satellite images.
More than 100,000 people – less than the pre-war population of about 430,000 – are believed to have been trapped in Mariupol with little food, water or heat, and more than 20,000 civilians have been killed in a nearly two-month siege, according to Ukrainian authorities. .
Most attempts to evacuate civilians from the city have failed because of what Ukrainians said continued Russian shelling.
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Fish reported from Zaporozhye, Ukraine. Associated Press reporters Mstislav Chernov and Felipe Dana in Kharkov, Ukraine, Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Inna Varenitsa in Kvov and Robert Burns and Aamer Madhani in Washington contributed to the report, as did other PA officials around the world.
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