Ukrainians plead for rescue from bombed-out Mariupol
KHARKIV, UKRAINE —
Ukrainian forces fought village by village Saturday to hold back a Russian advance through the country’s east, while the United Nations worked to broker a civilian evacuation from the last defensive stronghold in the bombed-out ruins of the port city of Mariupol.
An estimated 100,000 civilians remain in the city, and up to 1,000 are living beneath a sprawling Soviet-era steel plant, according to Ukrainian officials. Ukraine has not said how many fighters are also in the plant, the only part of Mariupol not occupied by Russian forces, but Russia put the number at about 2,000.
Russian state media outlets reported Saturday that 25 civilians had been evacuated from the Azovstal steelworks, though there was no confirmation from the U.N. Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency said 19 adults and six children were brought out, but gave no further details.
A top official with the Azov Regiment, the Ukrainian unit defending the plant, said 20 civilians were evacuated during a cease-fire, though it was not clear if he was referring to the same group as the Russian news reports.
“These are women and children,” Sviatoslav Palamar said in a video posted on the regiment’s Telegram channel. He also called for the evacuation of the wounded: “We don’t know why they are not taken away and their evacuation to the territory controlled by Ukraine is not being discussed.”
Video and images from inside the plant, shared with The Associated Press by two Ukrainian women who said their husbands are among the fighters refusing to surrender there, showed unidentified men with stained bandages; others had open wounds or amputated limbs.
A skeleton medical staff was treating at least 600 wounded people, said the women, who identified their husbands as members of the Azov Regiment of Ukraine’s National Guard. Some of the wounds were rotting with gangrene, they said.
In the video the men said that they eat just once daily and share as little as 1.5 liters of water a day among four people, and that supplies inside the besieged facility are depleted.
A shirtless man appeared in pain as he described his wounds: two broken ribs, a punctured lung and a dislocated arm that “was hanging on the flesh.”
“I want to tell everyone who sees this: If you will not stop this here, in Ukraine, it will go further, to Europe,” he said.
AP could not independently verify the date and location of the video, which the women said was taken in the last week in the maze of corridors and bunkers beneath the plant.
The women urged that Ukrainian fighters also be evacuated alongside civilians, warning they could be tortured and executed if captured. “The lives of soldiers matter too,” Yuliia Fedusiuk told AP in Rome. In other developments:
Ukrainian Deputy Agriculture Minister Taras Vysotsky said in televised remarks that Russian forces have seized hundreds of thousands of tons of grain in territory under their control. Ukraine is a major grain producer, and the invasion has pushed up world prices and raised concerns about shortages.
A Russian rocket attack destroyed the airport runway in Odesa, Ukraine’s thirdmost populous city and a key Black Sea port, the Ukrainian army said.
Lines formed at gas stations in Kyiv, Dnipro and other cities as Ukraine faced fuel shortages because Russia has destroyed its fuel infrastructure and blocked ports, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his Friday address. He said there were “no immediate solutions” to the shortages, but hoped the situation would improve in the next week or two.
The bodies of three men were found buried in a forest near the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, the head of Kyiv’s regional police force said. The men, whose bodies were found Friday, had been tortured before they were shot in the head, Andriy Nebytov wrote on Facebook.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview that Russian and Ukrainian negotiators talk “almost every day.” However, he told Chinese state news agency Xinhua, “progress has not been easy.”