Russian forces on Tuesday began storming the steel plant, which was the last pocket of resistance in Mariupol, Ukrainian defenders said as the western city of Lviv came under numerous Russian strikes overnight.
Svyatoslav Palamar, deputy commander of the Ukrainian Azov Regiment, said the Russians were launching a heavy assault with “support for armored vehicles and tanks, attempts to land troops from boats and large numbers of infantry”.
The Azov Regiment is a far-right armed group that was included in the National Guard of Ukraine after Russia’s first invasion in 2014.
“We will do everything we can to repel the attack, but we call for urgent measures to evacuate the civilians who remain at the plant and bring them safely,” Palamar said in a statement to the Telegram news agency.
He added that the plant had been shelled by naval artillery and air strikes throughout the night. Two civilian women were killed and 10 civilians were injured, he said.
Smoke rises above the Azovstal metallurgical plant in Mariupol on Monday. (Alexander Ermochenko / Reuters)
Earlier on Tuesday, Mariupol’s patrol police chief, Mikhail Vershinin, was quoted by Ukrainian television as saying that the Russian military “has begun storming the plant in several places.”
Denis Schlega, commander of a brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine, also in Azovstal, also said that “the enemy is trying to storm the Azovstal plant with considerable force, using armored vehicles.”
The number of Ukrainian fighters hiding inside is unclear, but the Russians estimate the number was 2,000 weeks ago and there are reports of 500 wounded.
Several hundred civilians remain there, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk said.
Protesters are calling for Ukrainian fighters to be evacuated from the besieged Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, along with civilians. These women held a demonstration in the city of Zaporozhye on Tuesday. (Wesley Marcelino / Reuters)
The attack began almost two weeks after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his military not to storm the plant to finish off the defenders, but to seal it.
Russia is targeting other cities
Russian troops also fired on a chemical plant in the eastern city of Avdievka, killing at least 10 people, said Pavlo Kirilenko, Donetsk’s regional governor.
“The Russians knew exactly where to aim – the workers had just finished their shift and were waiting for a bus at a bus stop to take them home,” Kirilenko wrote in a Telegram post. “Another cynical crime of Russians on our land.”
Explosions were also heard in Lviv, in western Ukraine, near the Polish border. The strikes damaged three substations, cut off electricity and disrupted water supply in parts of the city, and injured two people, the mayor said.
Smoke rises over the city of Lviv after a series of air strikes on Tuesday. (Yuri Dyachishin / AFP / Getty Images)
Lviv was a gateway for NATO-supplied weapons and a refuge for those fleeing fighting in the east.
The rocket also hit an infrastructure facility in a mountainous region in Transcarpathia, a region in far western Ukraine bordering Poland, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, authorities said. There was no immediate information about the victims.
A spokesman for Russia’s Defense Ministry, Major General Igor Konashenkov, said Russian planes and artillery had hit hundreds of targets over the past day, including army fortresses, command posts, artillery positions, fuel and ammunition depots and radar equipment.
Ukrainian authorities say the Russians have also attacked at least half a dozen railway stations across the country.
A civilian convoy reaches a safer city
Earlier on Tuesday, the United Nations confirmed that 127 civilians evacuated from Mariupol Steel and the nearby town over the weekend had arrived in the city of Zaporozhye.
A woman embraces relatives after arriving by bus in Zaporozhye on Tuesday. Thousands of Ukrainians continue to flee Russian-occupied areas. (Francisco Seco / Associated Press)
Osnat Lubriani, the UN humanitarian coordinator for Ukraine traveling with the convoy, said on Tuesday that the evacuees included 101 people who could finally leave the bunkers under the Azovstal steel plant and see the light of day in two months. ” .
Another 58 people joined the convoy in Manchush, a town on the outskirts of Mariupol.
“In recent days, traveling with evacuees, I have heard mothers, children and frail grandparents talk about the trauma of life day after day under relentless heavy shelling and fear of death, and with extreme lack of water, food and sanitation,” he said. Lubrani.
“They talked about the hell they had been through since the beginning of this war, seeking refuge in the Azovstal plant.
Lubrani said many of the evacuees fled to the steel plant for safety and were trapped.
WATCH Ukrainian civilians achieve safety from bombed Mariupol steel:
Ukrainian civilians are safe from the bombed Mariupol steel mine
WARNING: This video contains graphics Trapped for weeks, the first group of civilians emerged safely from the steel plant in the besieged city of Mariupol as a result of UN-mediated talks with Russia. 2:33
One evacuee said she went to sleep at the factory every night, fearing she would not wake up.
“You can’t imagine how scary it is when you sit in a shelter, in a wet and damp basement that bounces and trembles,” said Elina Tsibulchenko, 54, on her arrival in Zaporozhye.
She added: “We prayed to God that the rockets would fly over our shelter, because if they hit the shelter, we will all be ready.”
Others remain trapped in Mariupol
In total, about 100,000 people may still be in Mariupol, which had a pre-war population of more than 400,000. Russian forces smashed much of the city in ruins, trapping civilians with little food, water, heat or medicine.
An employee of the International Committee of the Red Cross is helping people fleeing Mariupol and other cities when they arrive in Zaporozhye on Tuesday. (Francisco Seco / Associated Press)
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky told Greek state television that other civilians at the steel plant were afraid to board buses, fearing they would be taken to Russia. He said the UN had assured him that they could go to areas controlled by his government.
More than 1 million people, including nearly 200,000 children, have been taken from Ukraine to Russia, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Monday, according to the state news agency TASS.
Defense Ministry spokesman Mikhail Mizintsev said the figure included 11,550 people, including 1,847 children, in the previous 24 hours, “without the involvement of Ukrainian authorities.”
These civilians “would be evacuated to the territory of the Russian Federation from the dangerous regions of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics” and other parts of Ukraine, according to the report. No details were provided.
Zelensky said on Monday that at least 220 Ukrainian children have been killed by the Russian army since the start of the war in late February, and 1,570 educational institutions have been destroyed or damaged.
Mariupol is vital to Russia’s renewed military efforts
After failing to take Kyiv in the first weeks of the war, Russia withdrew some of its forces and then said it would shift its focus to Ukraine’s eastern industrial center, Donbass.
Mariupol is in the region and its takeover will deprive Ukraine of a vital port, allow Russia to build a land corridor to the Crimean peninsula, which it took from Ukraine in 2014, and free troops for battles elsewhere in Donbas.
Russian shelling destroyed the southern port city of Mariupol, seen here on Tuesday, where an estimated 100,000 civilians are trapped. (Alexander Ermochenko / Reuters)
Michael Carpenter, the US ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said Monday that the United States believes the Kremlin will also recognize the southern city of Kherson as an independent republic. No move will be recognized by the United States or its allies, he said.
Russia plans to hold fictitious referendums in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions “to try to give the appearance of democratic or electoral legitimacy” and to attach the subjects to Russia, Carpenter said. He also said there were signs that Russia would hold an independence vote in Kherson.
Mayors and local lawmakers were abducted, the Internet and mobile phones were cut off, and a Russian school program will soon be imposed, Carpenter said. The Ukrainian government claims that Russia has introduced its ruble as a currency there.
WATCH The EU is in crisis talks to ban Russian oil, the United States promises additional support for Ukraine:
The EU is in crisis talks to ban Russian oil, the United States promises additional support for Ukraine
EU energy ministers have gathered to seek a common position on a ban on Russian oil, which is expected to be part of the next round of sanctions against Russia’s war in Ukraine. In the United States, officials have promised more support for the Ukrainian military, including a huge $ 33 billion military aid package awaiting congressional approval. 2:02
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