Ukraine has vowed that its forces will “fight to the end” in the besieged port city of Mariupol, after a Russian ultimatum for the remaining Ukrainian troops there to surrender expired.
Moscow is edging closer to full control of the city in what would be its biggest prize since it invaded Ukraine in February. Relentless bombardment and street fighting have left much of the city pulverised, killing at least 21,000 people by Ukrainian estimates.
“The city still has not fallen,” the prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, said hours after Moscow’s deadline for fighters holed up and surrounded in a sprawling, fortress-like steelworks to surrender passed. “There’s still our military forces, our soldiers. So they will fight to the end,” he told ABC.
The fall of Mariupol, the largest trading port in the Sea of Azov – from which Ukraine exports grain, iron, steel and heavy machinery – would be an economic blow to Kyiv and a symbolic and strategic victory for Russia, connecting territory it holds in Donbas with the Crimea region it annexed in 2014.
It would also help reassure the Russian public amid the worsening economic situation from western sanctions and make more troops available for a new offensive in the east, which, if successful, would give the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, a position of strength from which to pressure Ukraine into making concessions.
On Saturday night the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, described the situation in the city as “inhuman” and accused Russia of “deliberately trying to destroy everyone” there.
In a possible acknowledgment that Russia was close to taking the city, he said Ukrainian troops controlled only a small part of Mariupol and faced much larger Russian numbers.
The situation was “very difficult” in Mariupol, Zelenskiy told the Ukrayinska Pravda news portal. “Our soldiers are blocked; the wounded are blocked. There is a humanitarian crisis … Nevertheless, the guys are defending themselves.”
Having failed to overcome Ukrainian resistance in the north, the Russian military has refocused its ground offensive on the eastern Donbas area while maintaining long-distance strikes elsewhere including the capital, Kyiv.
Russia gave remaining Ukrainian soldiers a 6am Moscow time (3am GMT) deadline to lay down their arms and a 1pm (10am GMT) deadline to evacuate, which passed without any sign of compliance by Ukrainian fighters holed up in the smouldering Azovstal steelworks. The steelworks, one of Europe’s biggest metallurgical plants with a maze of rail tracks and blastfurnaces, has become a last stand for the outnumbered defenders.
“All those who will continue resistance will be destroyed,” a Russian defence ministry spokesperson said on Sunday, raising fears of further bloodshed.
The city has seen some of the fiercest fighting and worst civilian suffering since the invasion on 24 February, with bodies littering destroyed streets and thousands hunkered down in atrocious conditions underground.
Zelenskiy said that if Russian forces killed Kyiv’s troops remaining to defend the city, then a fledgling negotiation process to end nearly two months of fighting would be ended. “The destruction of all our guys in Mariupol – what they are doing now – can put an end to any format of negotiations,” he said.
Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, said the city was on “the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe” and warned the country was compiling evidence of alleged Russian atrocities there. “We will hand everything over to The Hague. There will be no impunity,” he said.
Ukrainian authorities have urged people in Donbas to move west to escape a large-scale Russian offensive to capture Donetsk and Luhansk.
There were more reports on Sunday of sporadic Russian strikes around major population centres across the country, after the humiliating loss of Russia’s Moskva warship in the Black Sea last week.
The mayor of Brovary, close to Kyiv, said a missile attack had damaged infrastructure. Russia said it had destroyed an ammunition factory near the capital, according to the RIA news agency. It was the third attack in as many days on targets around Kyiv: on Friday Russian forces destroyed a plant that allegedly produced one of the missiles used to sink the Moskva, and on Saturday Russian rockets allegedly hit a military hardware factory in the capital’s Darnytskyi district.
In the north-east, Russian artillery pounded multiple neighbourhoods in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. At least two people were killed and four others were injured, though the scale of the attack suggested the toll could rise. The barrage slammed into apartment buildings and left broken glass, debris and part of at least one rocket scattered on the street. Firefighters and residents scrambled to douse flames in several apartments that caught fire.
The city’s mayor, Ihor Terekhov, said three people were killed and 34 wounded in strikes on Saturday.
Despite the desperate situation in Mariupol, Ukraine said it was holding off Russian forces in other parts of the self-proclaimed republics in Donetsk and Luhansk.
On Sunday, Ukrainian police in Donetsk said that over the past 24 hours Russian forces had opened fire from tanks, multiple rocket launchers and heavy artillery on 13 settlements under Ukrainian control, killing two civilians.
