KYIV —
Ukraine on Sunday vowed to fight to the end in
Mariupol after a Russian ultimatum expired for remaining forces to surrender in
the southeastern port city where Moscow is pushing for a major strategic
victory.
اضافة اعلان
“The city still has not fallen,” 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’s “This Week”, with
Moscow shifting
its military focus to gaining control of the eastern Donbas region and forging
a land corridor to already-annexed Crimea.
Russia’s defense ministry said that there were up to
400 mercenaries inside the encircled Azovstal steel plant, calling on Ukrainian
forces inside to “lay down their arms and surrender in order to save their
lives”.
Moscow claims Kyiv has ordered fighters of the
nationalist Azov battalion to “shoot on the spot” anyone wanting to surrender.
‘Dead end’
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky said that if Russian forces kill Kyiv’s troops remaining to defend the
city, then a fledgling negotiation process to end nearly two months of fighting
would be ended.
Russian President Vladimir Putin had already said
the talks were at a “dead end”.
Shmyhal said
Ukraine wanted a diplomatic solution “if possible”, but added: “If the Russians
wouldn’t like negotiations, we’ll fight to the end, absolutely. We will not
surrender.”
While several cities are under siege, he said, not
one — with the exception of Kherson in the south — had fallen. He said more
than 900 towns and cities had been liberated.
As Russia scales up attacks on Ukraine’s eastern
flank, at least five people were killed and 13 wounded in a series of strikes
in second city
Kharkiv, just 21km the Russian border.
An air strike also hit an armaments factory in the
capital Kyiv.
Maksym Khaustov, the head of the Kharkiv region’s health
department, confirmed the deaths following a series of strikes that AFP
journalists on the scene said had ignited fires throughout the city and torn
roofs from buildings.
At one site, AFP saw a blood-stained coat next to a
pool of fresh blood on the ground. A local reported hearing between six and
eight missiles hit in the kind of strike that has become a daily occurrence.
“The whole home rumbled and trembled,” 71-year-old
Svitlana Pelelygina told AFP as she surveyed her wrecked apartment. “Everything
here began to burn.”
“I called the firefighters. They said, ‘We are on
our way but we were also being shelled.’”
‘Inhuman’
Ukrainian Deputy Prime
Minister
Iryna Vereshchuk urged Russian forces to allow evacuations from
Mariupol.
“Once again, we demand the opening of a humanitarian
corridor for the evacuation of civilians, especially women and children, from
Mariupol,” Vereshchuk wrote.
Zelensky said the situation in Mariupol was
“inhuman” and called on the West to immediately provide heavy weapons.
Mariupol has become a symbol of Ukraine’s
unexpectedly fierce resistance since Russian troops invaded the former Soviet state on February 24.
The
UN World Food Program says that more than
100,000 civilians in Mariupol are on the verge of famine, and lack water and
heating.
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.
With fighting raging in the east, Deputy Prime
Minister Vereshchuk said that humanitarian corridors allowing civilians to flee
would not open on Sunday after failing to agree terms with Russian forces.
Ukrainian authorities have urged people in the
eastern
Donbas area to move west to escape a large-scale Russian offensive to
capture its composite regions, Donetsk and Lugansk.
‘Easter of war’
Celebrating Easter Sunday in
Rome, Pope Francis called for peace in Ukraine during this “Easter of war”.
“May there be peace for war-torn Ukraine, so sorely
tried by the violence and destruction of the cruel and senseless war into which
it was dragged,” the pontiff said in his traditional Urbi et Orbi address on
St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican.
“Let there be a decision for peace. May there be an
end to the flexing of muscles while people are suffering.”
Francis said he held “in my heart all the many
Ukrainian victims, the millions of refugees and internally displaced persons,
the divided families, the elderly left to themselves, the lives broken and the
cities razed to the ground.”
“I see the faces of the orphaned children fleeing
from the war.”
Zelensky said he has invited his French counterpart
to visit Ukraine to see for himself evidence that
Russian forces have committed
“genocide”, a term President Emmanuel Macron has avoided.
“I talked to him yesterday,” Zelensky told CNN in an
interview recorded on Friday but broadcast on Sunday.
“I just told him I want him to understand that this
is not war, but nothing other than genocide. I invited him to come when he will
have the opportunity. He’ll come and see, and I’m sure he will understand.”
‘Unpredictable consequences’
Russia warned the United
States this week of “unpredictable consequences” if it sends its “most
sensitive” weapons systems to Ukraine, as Zelensky has requested.
Its defense ministry claimed Saturday to have shot
down a Ukrainian transport plane in the Odessa region, carrying weapons
supplied by Western nations.
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