Ukraine defiant as Mariupol teeters on brink

The battered port city of Mariupol on Sunday appeared on the brink of falling to Russian forces after seven weeks under siege, a development that would give Moscow a crucial success in Ukraine following a botched attempt to storm the capital and the loss of the Russian navy’s 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 another deadline for their surrender, saying those who put down their weapons were “guaranteed to keep their lives”, but Ukraine remained defiant.

“All those who will continue resistance will be destroyed,” said Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, the Russian Defence Ministry’s spokesman.

He said intercepted communications indicated there were about 400 foreign mercenaries along with the Ukrainian troops at the Azovstal steel mill, a claim that couldn’t be independently verified.

Seizing Mariupol would free up Russian forces to weaken and encircle Ukrainian soldiers in eastern Ukraine, where Russia has focused its war aims for now and is deploying personnel and equipment withdrawn from the north after the failure to take Kyiv.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 near Kyiv and elsewhere on Sunday 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 on Friday vowed to step up missile strikes on the capital.

The Russian military said on Sunday that it had attacked an ammunition plant near Kyiv overnight with precision-guided missiles, the third such strike in as many days.

Russia’s stepped-up attacks on Kyiv came after it accused Ukraine on Thursday of wounding seven people and damaging about 100 residential buildings with airstrikes in Bryansk, a region bordering Ukraine.

Ukrainian officials have not confirmed hitting targets in Russia.

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said a Saturday strike 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 on Sunday also claimed 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 prewar 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.