Zelensky says many trapped in Mariupol

About 1,000 civilians remain trapped at a steel plant where Ukrainian forces are making their last stand in the besieged city of Mariupol, President Volodymyr Zelensky said, after a Russian ultimatum to surrender or die expired on Wednesday.

Zelensky said conditions in Mariupol, which has seen the worst fighting of the nearly eight-week long war, continued to worsen, though Reuters witnesses said a few dozen civilians managed to leave the city on Wednesday in a small bus convoy.

The United Nations said the total number of refugees who have fled Ukraine since Russia invaded on Feb. 24 had now topped five million. More than half are children.

Ukraine said it had so far held off an assault by thousands of Russian troops attempting to advance in what Kyiv calls the Battle of the Donbas, a new campaign to seize two eastern provinces Moscow claims on behalf of separatists.

Russia’s defence ministry said in its latest bulletin that its forces had carried out strikes on dozens of military facilities in eastern Ukraine and had shot down a Ukrainian Mi-8 helicopter near the village of Koroviy Yar.

In Mariupol, once a prosperous port of 400,000 people and now a devastated wasteland where corpses lie in the streets, Russia was hitting the last main Ukrainian stronghold, the Azovstal steel plant, with bunker-buster bombs, Kyiv said.

Few evacuated

Mariupol city authorities had said on Wednesday they hoped to evacuate about 6,000 people under a preliminary accord with Russia - the first in weeks - on establishing a safe corridor.

But the deputy commander of the Azov Regiment in Mariupol, Svyatoslav Kalamar, later told Ukrainian TV that civilians were too frightened to make their way to the agreed evacuation points because Azovstal was under constant bombardment.

Kalomar said several bunkers under the plant still held about 80-100 civilians each.

Regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said fewer buses than planned had been able to get through to pick up civilians.

“People of course gathered at the agreed meeting points, but few of them got onto the buses,” he added, providing no figures.

Russian-backed separatists said shortly before a 2 p.m. (1100 GMT) Wednesday deadline that just five people in Mariupol had surrendered following Moscow’s ultimatum. The previous day, Russia said no one had responded to a similar surrender demand.

President Zelenskiy said he remained ready to swap Russian prisoners of war in exchange for safe passage for the trapped civilians and Ukrainian soldiers.

A Ukrainian marine commander, Serhiy Volny, said in a video posted online early on Wednesday that his troops may be able to hold out for only a few hours. It remained unclear on Wednesday evening how many Ukrainian forces remained in the city.

“The enemy units are dozens of times larger than ours, they have dominance in the air, in artillery, in ground troops, in equipment and in tanks,” said Volny. Reuters was unable to verify the video, posted on the Telegram messaging app.

Russia has been trying to take full control of Mariupol since the war’s early days. Its capture would be a big strategic prize, linking territory held by pro-Russian separatists in the east with the Crimea region that Moscow annexed in 2014.

Russia has so far failed to capture any of Ukraine’s largest cities in the face of fierce Ukrainian resistance. Moscow was forced to retreat from northern Ukraine after an assault on Kyiv was repelled last month, but has poured troops back in for an assault on the east that began this week.

The battle for the Donbas region, which includes the provinces Luhansk and Donetsk, could be decisive as Russia searches for a victory to justify President Vladimir Putin’s invasion. Putin says Ukraine mistreated Russian-speakers in the Donbas, an accusation Kyiv dismisses as false.

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