Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday hailed the takeover of Mariupol, a strategic port city in southeastern Ukraine, as a “successful move”, but he now prefers to surround the last resistance fighters in the city rather than target them with a final attack.
Resistance Ukrainian soldiers are holed up in the large “Azovestal” steel factory in this coastal city in the far south of the Donbas region, which became a heap of rubble following being bombed by Russian forces and besieged for nearly two months. They refuse to surrender, and the deputy commander of the “Azov” battalion, Svyatoslav Balamar, demanded via Telegram “guarantees” of security from the “civilized world” before leaving.
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky asserts that “regarding a thousand civilians, women and children” and “hundreds of wounded” are holed up with them in the compound.
In this context, the Russian President considered “the proposed attack on the industrial zone inappropriate”, ordering it “to cancel”, according to what he said during a meeting with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, which was broadcast on Russian television. He said, “The lives and health of our soldiers and officers must be taken into consideration, and we should not go into these dungeons and crawl underground.”
And he added, “Besiege all of this area so that not a single fly passes through it.” After warnings from the Russian military to the Ukrainian fighters, Putin called on them to surrender, vowing to keep them safe and “decently treated”.
Evacuations resume
Shoigu told Putin that “regarding two thousand fighters are still in the steel plant,” while the Russian Defense Minister did not mention any civilians among them.
The Ukrainian authorities fear that more than 20,000 people have died in Mariupol due to the fighting on the one hand and the lack of food, water and electricity on the other. The Russian army has controlled a large part of the city for days, and has accompanied foreign journalists on a tour of the sites it seized.
During the siege imposed on the city, the evacuation of civilians was rare and fraught with danger, but Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk revealed Thursday that four buses to evacuate civilians have left the city. She is on her way to Zaporozhye, 200 km away, a journey that may take days because of the numerous checkpoints in the area in southeastern Ukraine where the fighting continues.
continuous bombardment
In the remaining area of Donbass and in the south of the country, the Russian forces continue their “artillery bombardment along the front line”. The battles are raging in the Izyum region, especially with “continuous bombing” in Popasna and Robyzhny in the Lugansk region and new strikes on Mykolaiv in the south on the road to Odessa, which killed one person and wounded two, according to the region’s governor, Vitaly Kim.
“The situation is getting more and more complicated hour by hour,” Luhansk Governor Sergei Goday wrote on Telegram. He reiterated his call to civilians: “Take cover (…) leave!”
In Borodianka, located in the Kyiv region, which was occupied by Russian forces in March, local authorities confirmed Thursday that they had found nine new bodies of civilians killed by the Russians. “These people were killed by the (Russian) occupiers, and some of the victims bear signs of torture,” local police chief Andrei Nebitov said on Facebook.
Speaking to AFP from Borodianka, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Olga Stevanishina said that “1,020 bodies are nothing but civilians, in the morgues of the Kyiv region.”
protracted war
While the suffering of Mariupol appears to be nearing its end, the battles for control of the entire Donbass region and part of southern Ukraine are likely to be long-running.
Mariupol may constitute a link point between the Russian forces in the north of Donbas and those in Crimea and allow sending more soldiers to reinforce the Russian positions on the battle front to the north, which may prolong the war, especially with the Ukrainians receiving more military aid in recent days, whether from the Americans or from other partners.
After a long hesitation, Israel indicated that it had agreed for the first time to send protective equipment (helmets and flak jackets) to the Ukrainian army, while Norway announced that it had provided Kyiv with 100 French-designed anti-aircraft missiles.
On a visit to Kyiv where he met Zelensky, European Council President Charles Michel said Wednesday that the EU would do “whatever it can to support Ukraine and ensure that it wins the war.” In particular, he promised that sanctions would soon target Russian oil and gas exports, as demanded by President Zelensky.
On Thursday, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, accompanied by his Danish counterpart Mette Frederiksen, arrived in Kyiv to meet President Zelensky.
For his part, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, whose country is trying to mediate the conflict, accused “NATO countries” of seeking to “continue the war” so that “Russia is weakened.”
For their part, some Western diplomats fear that a protracted war will shake the foundations of the military alliance, whose countries have imposed unprecedentedly severe sanctions on Russia. If the battles are concentrated in the Donbass region, far from Kyiv and the borders of NATO, the sense of unity and the need to move may diminish with time, and “this is the bet,” a diplomat told AFP.
