Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, April 17: Even as the strategic Ukrainian port city of Mariupol seemed to be on the verge of falling to the Russian forces, Russia on Sunday stepped up the scattered attacks on the capital city of Kyiv with the Ukrainian president Volydymyr Zelensky cautioned that he would scrap the peace talks with the invading Russians “if the last Ukrainian soldier in the besieged Mariupol is killed.”
The cautioning from Zelensky came after the Russian forces issued a call to the trapped Ukrainian forces to surrender or to face destruction. The Russian military has warned that Ukrainian troops refusing to surrender in the besieged port of Mariupol will be destroyed. Estimating that about 2,500 Ukrainian soldiers were still holding out in 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.
And at the same time it warned that “All those who will continue resistance will be destroyed.” Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, the Russian Defence Ministry’s spokesman, 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.
A series of strikes Sunday in Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv in the north east of the war-scarred country left at least five dead and 13 injured, a regional health official said. Maksym Khaustov, the head of the Kharkiv region’s health department, confirmed the deaths following a series of strikes that some media persons at the site said had ignited fires throughout the city and torn roofs from buildings hit in the attacks. A missile attack in the early hours of Sunday damaged infrastructure in the city of Brovary, near Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv, Igor Sapozhko, mayor of Brovary said in an online post. There were no details on the extent of the destruction and potential casualties.
The roofs of some homes had been torn off by the force of the blasts, showering debris onto the road below. Since pulling back from its northern offensive to capture the capital of Kyiv, the Kremlin has scaled up attacks on Ukraine’s eastern flank, including Kharkiv just about 20 kilometres from the Russian border.
The fall of Mariupol after seven weeks of siege would give Moscow a crucial success in Ukraine following a botched attempt to storm the capital and the loss of the prestigious Black Sea Flagship Moksva. The fall of Mariupol would free up the Russian forces encircle Ukrainian soldiers forces 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 Defense 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 Sunday near Kyiv and elsewhere in an apparent effort to weaken Ukraine’s military capacity before the anticipated assault in the east.
After the humiliating loss of Moksva, Russia’s military command vowed Friday to step up missile strikes on the capital. The Russian military said 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 Defense 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 also claimed Sunday to have destroyed Ukrainian air defense 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 earlier this month.
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 pre-war population of 450,000. Ms. Malyar, the deputy defense 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.
Capturing the city with a land area about half the size of Hong Kong’s and home to a Sea of Azov port would also allow Russia to secure a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula, which it annexed from Ukraine in 2014. So far, tunnels at the sprawling Azovstal steel mill, which covers an area of more than 11 square kilometres have allowed the defenders to hide and resist until they run out of ammunition.
With Russia apparently poised to declare victory, Zelensky said the city’s fall could scuttle any attempt at a negotiated peace. “The destruction of all our guys in Mariupol — what they are doing now — can put an end to any format of negotiations,” Zelensky said in an interview with Ukrainian journalists.
In his nightly address to the nation, Zelensky called on the West to send more heavy weapons immediately if there is any chance of saving the city, adding Russia “is deliberately trying to destroy everyone who is there.”
Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer, who met with Vladimir Putin this past week in Moscow, the first European leader to do so since the invasion began on February 24, said the Russian president is “in his own war logic” on Ukraine. In a “Meet the Press” event, Nehammer said he thinks Putin believes he is winning the war and “we have to look in his eyes and we have to confront him with that, what we see in Ukraine.’’ Nehammer said he told Putin what he saw during a visit to the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, where more than 350 bodies have been found along with evidence of killings and torture under Russian occupation, and “it was not a friendly conversation.”