- Russia sacks deputy defence minister sanctioned by West over Mariupol, reports say Reuters
- Putin axes ‘Butcher of Mariupol’ Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev in military purge New York Post
- Ukraine-Russia war – latest: Putin ‘sacks Butcher of Mariupol’ as 17 killed in missile strikes Yahoo News
- As rumors spread that Russia’s deputy defense minister has been fired, the Kremlin’s spokesman declines to comment Meduza
- Putin Fires ‘Butcher of Mariupol’ Russian General, Mikhail Mizintsev Newsweek
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Tag Archives: Mariupol
Russia to secure stronghold over Mariupol by stripping Ukrainian identity, building over devastation
Eight months after Mariupol fell to Russia following one of the most brutal battles throughout the war, Moscow is now building over the devastation, bringing in people to fill the abandoned city and cleansing it of any Ukrainian identity.
Amid months of failing to advance the front lines and ceding major cities like Kharkiv and Kherson to Ukrainian forces, the Kremlin reportedly turned its focus to Mariupol.
An investigation by the Associated Press found that the city is beginning to resemble a Russian garrison as Moscow ushers in troops, equipment, doctors, construction workers and administration officials.
The remains of a statue and other rubble lie in front of the Azovstal Steel Mill, which was the last place in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol to fall to Russian forces in late May 2022.
(AP Photo)
WINTER CAMO GEAR TOPS CHRISTMAS WISH LISTS FOR UKRAINIAN TROOPS AS DRONE STRIKES ESCALATE
Bombed out buildings are reportedly being torn down at a rate of one a day, and the extent of Russia’s deadly invasion has become even more evident as more bodies and mass graves are uncovered.
Some 50,000 homes are expected to be demolished.
The world watched the onslaught of the war as Russian forces pummeled the port city, and Ukrainian forces and civilians alike bunkered down for three months in an attempt to hold the city.
A construction worker works on the site of the new municipal medical center in Mariupol with an Orthodox church in the background, in territory under control of the government of the Donetsk People’s Republic, in eastern Ukraine, Wednesday, July 13, 2022.
(AP Photo/File)
The fight for the city eventually honed in on Mariupol’s Azovstal steel plant, where Ukrainian soldiers and civilians became trapped under Russia’s relentless bombing – blocking access to food, water and healthcare, and forcing thousands to eventually surrender.
Officials warned that as many as 25,000 civilians were killed in the siege, though according to the AP investigation that figure could be up to three times higher as rubble is removed and more graves uncovered.
PUTIN ORDERS SPY AGENCIES TO INTENSIFY HUNT FOR ‘TRAITORS, SPIES, SABOTEURS’ AS WAR EFFORT IN UKRAINE FALTERS
This Nov. 16, 2022 image from video shows some of the new graves which have been dug since the Russian siege began, at the Staryi Krym Cemetery on the outskirts of the occupied Ukrainian city of Mariupol.
(AP Photo)
As Ukrainian troops have begun to push the front lines farther eastward in Donetsk, Russia is looking to secure its hold over Mariupol by reportedly cleansing the city of any vestiges of Ukrainian identity.
Peace Avenue, which cuts through the city, has allegedly been renamed Lenin Avenue, and Soviet-era titles have replaced street names and signs across the city.
Russia has reportedly laid out new plans for the city that will center around the historic Drama Theater – which housed hundreds of Ukrainian men, women and children sheltering from Russian shelling in the first days of the war.
The theater was bombed by twin Russian airstrikes on March 16, and as many as 600 people were killed in the strike.
This Dec. 2, 2022 image from video shows fencing surrounding the Drama Theater in Mariupol, Ukraine. Months after hundreds died in Russian airstrikes on the theater, the fencing is etched with Russian and Ukrainian literary figures as well as an outline of the theater’s previous life, before Russian occupation.
(AP Photo)
Residents who remained in Mariupol said the theater reeked all summer as bodies remain trapped inside.
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In response to the devastation, Russia erected a screen around the building tall enough that it can be seen from space, AP found.
Russia apparently also plans to turn the Azovstal Steel Plant – a site that has remained a symbol of Ukrainian resistance – into an industrial park, though construction is not believed to have started on it.
‘Butcher of Mariupol’ promoted in Russian Army shakeup
Vladimir Putin ousted the Russian general who was responsible for the chaotic logistics operation that hamstrung his army as its Ukraine invasion floundered — and named a notoriously brutal replacement.
Gen. Dmitry Bulgakov, 67, was “released” Saturday, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Telegram, so that he could transfer into a new but unspecified role.
Bulgakov’s successor, Col. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev, is the infamous “Butcher of Mariupol” who ordered some of the Ukraine invasion’s worst atrocities — including an airstrike on a maternity hospital and an attack on a theater that was sheltering hundreds of children.
Previously, Mizintsev was responsible for the siege of Aleppo in Syria, where he ordered cluster-bomb strikes on residential areas to pound the city into submission.
Bulgakov has been blamed for Russia’s chronic inability to keep its troops in Ukraine fed and armed — forcing the humiliating retreat from Kyiv and the purchase of artillery and drones from North Korea and Iran, two of the only countries willing to deal with the pariah nation.
Meanwhile, the British Ministry of Defense reported, Russian troops attacked a dam on the Siverskyi Donets River with short-range ballistic missiles in an effort to flood Ukrainian military crossing points and slow their advance.
The bombing missions, which came on Wednesday and Thursday, “are unlikely to have caused significant disruption to Ukrainian operations,” the ministry noted.
Armed Russian troops continued their door-to-door efforts in the occupied Ukrainian areas of Donetsk and Luhansk to force locals to “vote” in a sham referendum to break away and join Russia.
The voting “looked more like an opinion survey under the gun barrels,” Luhansk Gov. Serhiy Haidai said.
About 100 refugees from ruined Mariupol gathered in Kyiv to protest the faux election, which echoes the 2014 referendum that Russia used as a pretext for its annexation of Crimea.
“It’s an illusion of choice when there isn’t any,” Elina Sytkova, 21, told CNBC.
In New York, China continued to signal its displeasure over Putin’s invasion.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who met with his Ukrainian counterpart this week during the UN General Assembly, “call[ed] on all parties concerned to keep the crisis from spilling over and to protect the legitimate rights and interests of developing countries,” he said Saturday in a General Assembly speech.
Russia frees 215 Ukrainians held after Mariupol battle, Ukraine says
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Sept 21 (Reuters) – Russia has released 215 Ukrainians it took prisoner after a protracted battle for the port city of Mariupol earlier this year, including top military leaders, a senior official in Kyiv said on Wednesday.
The freed prisoners include the commander and deputy commander of the Azov battalion that did much of the fighting, said Andriy Yermak, the head of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s office.
The move is unexpected, since Russian-backed separatists last month said there would be a trial of Azov personnel, who Moscow describes as Nazis. Ukraine denies the charge.
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In a statement, Yermak said the freed prisoners included Azov commander Lieutenant Colonel Denys Prokopenko and his deputy, Svyatoslav Palamar.
Also at liberty is Serhiy Volynsky, the commander of the 36th Marine Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
The three men had helped lead a dogged weeks-long resistance from the bunkers and tunnels below Mariupol’s giant steel works before they and hundreds of Azov fighters surrendered in May to Russian-backed forces.
Yermak said that in return, Kyiv had freed 55 Russian prisoners as well as Viktor Medvedchuk, the leader of a banned pro-Russian party who was facing treason charges.
Public broadcaster Suspline said the exchange had happened near the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv.
Earlier in the day, Saudi Arabia said Russia had released 10 foreign prisoners of war captured in Ukraine following mediation by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. read more
Last month, the head of the Russian-backed separatist administration in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk said a trial of captured Azov personnel would take place by the end of the summer. read more
The Azov unit, formed in 2014 as a militia to fight Russian-backed separatists, denies being fascist, and Ukraine says it has been reformed from its radical nationalist origins.
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Reporting by David Ljunggren
Editing by Alistair Bell and Rosalba O’Brien
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Lysychansk: Ukraine may have endured its worst week since the fall of Mariupol
For weeks, Russian forces have been trying to obliterate Ukrainian defensive positions to the south and east of the city, in an effort to encircle and cut off Ukrainian troops tasked with holding it.
In the last couple of days, the Russians have advanced into several villages south of Lysychansk, though not without sustaining losses from Ukrainian artillery fire. Indeed, the Ukrainian military claims that some Russian battalion tactical groups are being consolidated or withdrawn to restore their combat capabilities.
The Institute for the Study of War, in its latest daily analysis of the battlefield, says the Russian breakthrough from the south means they “may be able to threaten Lysychansk in the coming days while avoiding a difficult opposed crossing of the Siverskyi Donets River.”
The settlements that Ukrainian officials confirmed as lost Wednesday are all on the western Siverskyi Donets Riverbank, within 10 kilometers of the southern outskirts of the city.
“The Russians are approaching Lysychansk, entrenching in nearby towns. The city is being shelled by aircraft,” according to Serhiy Hayday, head of the Luhansk regional military administration.
Hayday acknowledged it was “difficult” in the area south of Lysychansk. “The enemy entered Toshkivka, which allowed it to increase fire on other settlements.”
He said Russian forces were entrenched in several villages immediately to the south of Lysychansk, including Ustynivka, Pidlisne and Myrna Dolyna, and were advancing at Bila Hora. “It is not easy for our soldiers to keep the defense,” he admitted.
Throughout its campaign, Russia has used the tactic of intense bombardment before trying to take territory. Hayday’s comments suggest that Ukrainian defenses around Lysychansk have begun to succumb to much greater Russian firepower, after weeks of bombardment.
Ukrainian forces continue to fight on the fringes of the neigboring city of Severodonetsk, and in adjacent communities — and they benefit from higher ground in Lysychansk.
But their already-compromised supply lines are becoming more tenuous, and the sheer magnitude of Russian firepower is grinding down defensive positions.
The reverses suffered in the past few days, after weeks of determined resistance, probably mark the most difficult week for the Ukrainian military since the surrender of the last defenders in Mariupol.
The attacks near Lysychansk are being carried out in tandem with renewed Russian efforts to cut the highway that runs west to Bakhmut, a critical line of communication for the Ukrainians. In some places, Russian forces are within a few kilometers of the highway.
The Ukrainian defense of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk has consumed the firepower of many Russian units and blunted their efforts to make progress in the neighboring Donetsk region. However, the Russians can still call on reserves being held in nearby areas of southwest Russia — while some of Ukraine’s best units are seriously depleted by months of missile, rocket, artillery and air attacks.
But if the Ukrainians decide to dig in around Lysychansk, it will likely require substantial Russian efforts, possibly over weeks, to take it. By then it may resemble the partially flattened cities of Severodonetsk, nearby Popasna and Mariupol.
Ukraine fears repeat of Mariupol horrors elsewhere in Donbas
KRAMATORSK, Ukraine (AP) — Moscow-backed separatists pounded eastern Ukraine’s industrial Donbas region Friday, claiming to capture a railway hub, as Ukrainian officials pleaded for the sophisticated Western weapons they say they need to stop the onslaught.
The advance of Russian forces raised fears that cities in the region would undergo the same horrors inflicted on the people of the port city Mariupol in the weeks before it fell.
The fighting Friday focused on two key cities: Sievierodonetsk and nearby Lysychansk. They are the last areas under Ukrainian control in Luhansk, one of two provinces that make up the Donbas and where Russia-backed separatists have already controlled some territory for eight years. Authorities say 1,500 people in Sievierodonetsk have already died since the war’s start three months ago. Russia-backed rebels also said they’d taken the railway hub of Lyman.
The governor of Luhansk warned that Ukrainian soldiers may have to retreat from Sievierodonetsk to avoid being surrounded. But he predicted an ultimate Ukrainian victory. “The Russians will not be able to capture Luhansk region in the coming days, as analysts predict,″ Serhiy Haidai wrote on Telegram on Friday. “We will have enough forces and means to defend ourselves.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelesnskyy also struck a defiant tone. In his nightly video address Friday, he said: “If the occupiers think that Lyman or Sievierodonetsk will be theirs, they are wrong. Donbas will be Ukrainian.”
For now, Sievierodonetsk Mayor Oleksandr Striuk told The Associated Press that “the city is being systematically destroyed — 90% of the buildings in the city are damaged.”
Striuk described conditions in Sievierodonetsk reminiscent of the battle for Mariupol, located in the Donbas’ other province, Donetsk. Now in ruins, the port city was constantly barraged by Russian forces in a nearly three-month siege that ended last week when Russia claimed its capture. More than 20,000 of its civilians are feared dead.
Before the war, Sievierodonetsk was home to around 100,000 people. About 12,000 to 13,000 remain in the city, Striuk said, huddled in shelters and largely cut off from the rest of Ukraine. At least 1,500 people have died there because of the war, now in its 93rd day. The figure includes people killed by shelling or in fires caused by Russian missile strikes, as well as those who died from shrapnel wounds, untreated diseases, a lack of medicine or being trapped under rubble, the mayor said.
In the city’s northeastern quarter, Russian reconnaissance and sabotage groups tried to capture the Mir Hotel and the area around it, Striuk said.
Hints of Russia’s strategy for the Donbas can be found in Mariupol, where Moscow is consolidating its control through measures including state-controlled broadcast programming and overhauled school curricula, according to an analysis from the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank.
Gen. Phillip Breedlove, former head of U.S. European Command for NATO, said Friday during a panel mounted by the Washington-based Middle East Institute that Russia appears to have “once again adjusted its objectives, and fearfully now it seems that they are trying to consolidate and enforce the land that they have rather than focus on expanding it.”
That aggressive push could backfire, however, by seriously depleting Russia’s arsenal. Echoing an assessment from the British Defense Ministry, military analyst Oleh Zhdanov said Russia was deploying 50-year-old T-62 tanks, “which means that the second army of the world has run out of modernized equipment.”
Russia-backed rebels said Friday that they had taken over Lyman, Donetsk’s large railway hub north of two more key cities still under Ukrainian control. Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych acknowledged the loss Thursday night, though a Ukrainian Defense Ministry spokesperson reported Friday that its soldiers countered Russian attempts to completely push them out.
As Ukraine’s hopes of stopping the Russian advance faded, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba pleaded with Western nations for heavy weapons, saying it was the one area in which Russia had a clear advantage.
“Without artillery, without multiple launch rocket systems we won’t be able to push them back,” he said.
The U.S. Defense Department would not confirm a CNN report that the Biden administration was preparing to send long-range rocket systems to Ukraine, perhaps as early as next week. “Certainly we’re mindful and aware of Ukrainian asks, privately and publicly, for what is known as a multiple launch rocket system. And I won’t get ahead of decisions that haven’t been made yet,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned that providing rockets that could reach his country would represent “a most serious step toward unacceptable escalation.” He spoke in an interview with RT Arabic that aired Friday.
Just south of Sievierodonetsk, volunteers hoped to evacuate 100 people from a smaller town. It was a painstaking process: Many of the evacuees from Bakhmut were elderly or infirm and needed to be carried out of apartment buildings in soft stretchers and wheelchairs.
Minibuses and vans zipped through the city, picking up dozens for the first leg of a long journey west.
“Bakhmut is a high-risk area right now,” said Mark Poppert, an American volunteer working with British charity RefugEase. “We’re trying to get as many people out as we can.”
To the north, neighboring Belarus — used by Russia as a staging ground before the invasion — announced Friday that it was sending troops toward the Ukrainian border.
In Russia’s Far East, a legislative deputy offered a rare display of opposition to the war in Ukraine, demanding the end of the military operation and the withdrawal of Russian troops. “We understand that if our country doesn’t stop the military operation, we’ll have more orphans in our country,” Leonid Vasyukevich of the Communist Party said Friday at a meeting of the Primorsk regional Legislative Assembly in the Pacific port of Vladivostok.
His comments, which he addressed to President Vladimir Putin, were shown in a video posted on a Telegram. Another deputy followed to support Vasyukevich’s views. But the legislative assembly’s chairman issued a statement afterward calling the remarks a “political provocation” not supported by the majority of lawmakers.
___
Karmanau reported from Lviv, Ukraine. Andrea Rosa in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Andrew Katell in New York and AP journalists around the world contributed.
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This story has been edited to correct that 1,500 people have died in Sievierodonetsk alone, not the Donbas region as a whole.
___
Follow AP’s coverage of the Ukraine war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
Ukraine fears repeat of Mariupol horrors elsewhere in Donbas
KRAMATORSK, Ukraine (AP) — Moscow-backed separatists pounded eastern Ukraine’s industrial Donbas region Friday, claiming to capture a railway hub, as Ukrainian officials pleaded for the sophisticated Western weapons they say they need to stop the onslaught.
The advance of Russian forces raised fears that cities in the region would undergo the same horrors inflicted on the people of the port city Mariupol in the weeks before it fell.
The fighting Friday focused on two key cities: Sievierodonetsk and nearby Lysychansk. They are the last areas under Ukrainian control in Luhansk, one of two provinces that make up the Donbas and where Russia-backed separatists have already controlled some territory for eight years. Authorities say 1,500 people in Sievierodonetsk have already died since the war’s start three months ago. Russia-backed rebels also said they’d taken the railway hub of Lyman.
The governor of Luhansk warned that Ukrainian soldiers may have to retreat from Sievierodonetsk to avoid being surrounded. But he predicted an ultimate Ukrainian victory. “The Russians will not be able to capture Luhansk region in the coming days, as analysts predict,″ Serhiy Haidai wrote on Telegram on Friday. “We will have enough forces and means to defend ourselves.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelesnskyy also struck a defiant tone. In his nightly video address Friday, he said: “If the occupiers think that Lyman or Sievierodonetsk will be theirs, they are wrong. Donbas will be Ukrainian.”
For now, Sievierodonetsk Mayor Oleksandr Striuk told The Associated Press that “the city is being systematically destroyed — 90% of the buildings in the city are damaged.”
Striuk described conditions in Sievierodonetsk reminiscent of the battle for Mariupol, located in the Donbas’ other province, Donetsk. Now in ruins, the port city was constantly barraged by Russian forces in a nearly three-month siege that ended last week when Russia claimed its capture. More than 20,000 of its civilians are feared dead.
Before the war, Sievierodonetsk was home to around 100,000 people. About 12,000 to 13,000 remain in the city, Striuk said, huddled in shelters and largely cut off from the rest of Ukraine. At least 1,500 people have died there because of the war, now in its 93rd day. The figure includes people killed by shelling or in fires caused by Russian missile strikes, as well as those who died from shrapnel wounds, untreated diseases, a lack of medicine or being trapped under rubble, the mayor said.
In the city’s northeastern quarter, Russian reconnaissance and sabotage groups tried to capture the Mir Hotel and the area around it, Striuk said.
Hints of Russia’s strategy for the Donbas can be found in Mariupol, where Moscow is consolidating its control through measures including state-controlled broadcast programming and overhauled school curricula, according to an analysis from the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank.
Gen. Phillip Breedlove, former head of U.S. European Command for NATO, said Friday during a panel mounted by the Washington-based Middle East Institute that Russia appears to have “once again adjusted its objectives, and fearfully now it seems that they are trying to consolidate and enforce the land that they have rather than focus on expanding it.”
That aggressive push could backfire, however, by seriously depleting Russia’s arsenal. Echoing an assessment from the British Defense Ministry, military analyst Oleh Zhdanov said Russia was deploying 50-year-old T-62 tanks, “which means that the second army of the world has run out of modernized equipment.”
Russia-backed rebels said Friday that they had taken over Lyman, Donetsk’s large railway hub north of two more key cities still under Ukrainian control. Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych acknowledged the loss Thursday night, though a Ukrainian Defense Ministry spokesperson reported Friday that its soldiers countered Russian attempts to completely push them out.
As Ukraine’s hopes of stopping the Russian advance faded, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba pleaded with Western nations for heavy weapons, saying it was the one area in which Russia had a clear advantage.
“Without artillery, without multiple launch rocket systems we won’t be able to push them back,” he said.
The U.S. Defense Department would not confirm a CNN report that the Biden administration was preparing to send long-range rocket systems to Ukraine, perhaps as early as next week. “Certainly we’re mindful and aware of Ukrainian asks, privately and publicly, for what is known as a multiple launch rocket system. And I won’t get ahead of decisions that haven’t been made yet,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said.
Just south of Sievierodonetsk, volunteers hoped to evacuate 100 people from a smaller town. It was a painstaking process: Many of the evacuees from Bakhmut were elderly or infirm and needed to be carried out of apartment buildings in soft stretchers and wheelchairs.
Minibuses and vans zipped through the city, picking up dozens for the first leg of a long journey west.
“Bakhmut is a high-risk area right now,” said Mark Poppert, an American volunteer working with British charity RefugEase. “We’re trying to get as many people out as we can.”
To the north, neighboring Belarus — used by Russia as a staging ground before the invasion — announced Friday that it was sending troops toward the Ukrainian border.
Some European leaders sought dialogue with Russian President Vladimir Putin about easing the global food crisis, exacerbated by Ukraine’s inability to ship millions of tons of grain and other agricultural products.
Moscow has sought to shift the blame for the food crisis to the West, calling upon its leaders to lift existing sanctions.
Putin told Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer on Friday that Ukraine should remove Black Sea mines to allow safe shipping, according to a Kremlin readout of their conversation; Russia and Ukraine have traded blame for the mines near Ukraine’s ports.
Nehammer’s office said the two leaders also discussed a prisoner exchange and said Putin indicated efforts to arrange one would be “intensified.”
___
Karmanau reported from Lviv, Ukraine. Andrea Rosa in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Andrew Katell in New York and AP journalists around the world contributed.
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This story has been edited to correct that 1,500 people have died in Sievierodonetsk alone, not the Donbas region as a whole.
___
Follow AP’s coverage of the Ukraine war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
Russia advances in Ukraine’s Donbas as Mariupol steelworks siege ends
KYIV, May 21 (Reuters) – Russia pressed for control of Ukraine’s Donbas region, claiming victory in the months-long battle for Mariupol’s steel plant and launching a major offensive on the remaining Ukrainian-held territory in the province of Luhansk.
The last Ukrainian forces holed up in Mariupol’s smashed Azovstal steelworks surrendered on Friday, Russia’s defense ministry said. That ended the most destructive siege of the war.
“The territory of the Azovstal metallurgical plant … has been completely liberated,” the ministry said in a statement, adding that 2,439 defenders had surrendered in the past few days, including 531 in the final group.
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Hours earlier, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the last defenders at the steelworks had been told by Ukraine’s military that they could get out and save their lives. The Ukrainians did not immediately confirm the figures on Azovstal.
Ukraine’s General Staff of Armed Forces did not comment on Russia’s claim in its morning update on Saturday.
Russia also launched what appeared to be a major assault to seize the last remaining Ukrainian-held territory in Luhansk, one of two southeastern Ukrainian provinces Moscow proclaims as independent states.
Serhiy Gaidai, the governor of the Luhansk region, said in a social media post early on Saturday that Russia was trying to destroy the city of Sievierodonetsk, with fighting taking place on the outskirts of the city.
“Shelling continues from morning to the evening and also throughout the night,” Gaidai said in a video post on the Telegram messaging app.
In early hours on Saturday, air raid sirens were going off in much of Ukraine, including in the Kyiv capital region and the southern port of Odesa.
Capturing Luhansk and Donetsk provinces, much of which make up Ukraine’s industrial Donbas region, would allow Moscow to claim a victory after announcing last month that this was now its objective.
Despite losing ground elsewhere in recent weeks, Russian forces have advanced on the Luhansk front.
“This will be the critical next few weeks of the conflict,” said Mathieu Boulegue, an expert at London’s Chatham House think tank. “And it depends on how effective they are at conquering Sievierodonetsk and the lands across it.”
The city of Sievierodonetsk and its twin Lysychansk across the Siverskiy Donets river form the eastern part of a Ukrainian-held pocket that Russia has been trying to overrun since mid-April after failing to capture Kyiv.
Ukraine’s general staff said on Saturday that Russian forces were preparing to try again to cross the river, after a previous attempt earlier this month led to one of the largest battles in the conflict so far.
BATTLE FOR MARIUPOL
The end of the Mariupol siege was an important symbolic moment for Russia, after a series of setbacks since the invasion began on Feb. 24, but it came at the cost of massive destruction.
Zelenskiy said the region had been “completely destroyed” by Russia and proposed a formal deal with the country’s allies to secure Russian compensation for the damage its forces had caused. read more
Natalia Zarytska, wife of an Azovstal fighter who surrendered, said she had not heard from him since a Telegram message exchange two days ago. She believed he was still alive.
“The situation is really hard and horrible and my husband is on the way from one hell to another hell, from Azovstal steel plant to a prison, to captivity,” Zarytska said in Istanbul, where she and other relatives lobbied Turkey to help save the fighters.
The Red Cross said it had registered hundreds of Ukrainians who surrendered at the plant as prisoners of war and Kyiv says it wants a prisoner swap. Moscow says the prisoners will be treated humanely, but Russian politicians have been quoted as saying some must be tried or even executed.
Russian forces in Ukraine have been driven in recent weeks from the area surrounding Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, their fastest retreat since being forced out of the north and the Kyiv region at the end of March.
But they still control a large swathe of the south and east, and the end of fighting in Mariupol means that that territory is now largely unbroken.
In a sign of Russia’s aim to boost its war effort, the parliament in Moscow said it would consider letting Russians over 40 and foreigners over 30 join the military.
The past week has also seen Sweden and Finland apply to join NATO, although Turkey has threatened to block them, accusing the Nordic countries of harbouring Kurdish militants.
Russia’s Gazprom (GAZP.MM) on Saturday halted gas exports to Finland, the Finnish gas system operator said, the latest escalation of an energy payments dispute with Western nations. read more
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Reporting by Natalia Zinets, Max Hunder, Tom Balmforth in Kyiv and Reuters bureaux; Writing by Peter Graff, Patricia Zengerle and Richard Pullin; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien and Bradley Perrett
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
West rushes more aid as Mariupol teeters and fighting rages
POKROVSK, Ukraine (AP) — The West moved to pour billions more in aid into Ukraine on Friday, as Russia shifted troops freed up by the imminent fall of the pulverized city of Mariupol and fighting raged in the country’s industrial heartland in the east.
Russian forces shelled a vital highway and kept up attacks on a key city in the Luhansk region, hitting a school among other sites, Ukrainian authorities said. Luhansk is part of the Donbas, the mostly Russian-speaking eastern expanse of coal mines and factories that Russian President Vladimir Putin is bent on capturing.
“The liberation of the Luhansk People’s Republic is nearing completion,” Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu declared, referring to the breakaway state proclaimed by pro-Moscow separatists in 2014 and recognized by the Kremlin.
In Mariupol, the strategic port in the southern corner of the Donbas, Russian troops worn down by their nearly three-month siege of the city may not get the time they need to regroup, Britain’s Defense Ministry said.
With the battle winding down for the Azovstal steel plant that represented the last bastion of Ukrainian resistance in Mariupol, Russia is continuing to pull back forces there, and their commanders are under pressure to quickly send them elsewhere in the Donbas, according to the British.
“That means that Russia will probably redistribute their forces swiftly without adequate preparation, which risks further force attrition,” the ministry said.
An undisclosed number of Ukrainian soldiers remained at the Azovstal steel plant. Russia said more than 1,900 had surrendered in recent days. Also remaining at the plant were the bodies of soldiers who defended it while tying down Russian forces.
Denis Prokopenko, commander of the Azov Regiment, which led the defense of the plant, called them “fallen heroes.”
“I hope soon relatives and the whole of Ukraine will be able to bury the fighters with honors,” he said.
Wives of fighters who held out at the steelworks spoke emotionally about what may have been their last contact with their husbands.
Olga Boiko, wife of a marine, wiped away tears as she said that her husband had written her on Thursday: “Hello. We surrender, I don’t know when I will get in touch with you and if I will at all. Love you. Kiss you. Bye.”
Natalia Zaritskaya, wife of another fighter at Azovstal, said that based on the messages she had seen over the past two days, “Now they are on the path from hell to hell. Every inch of this path is deadly.”
She said that two days ago, her husband reported that of the 32 soldiers with whom he had served, only eight survived, most of them seriously wounded.
In other developments:
— The Group of Seven major economies and global financial institutions agreed to provide more money to bolster Ukraine’s finances, bringing the total to $19.8 billion. In the U.S., President Joe Biden was expected to sign a $40 billion package of military and economic aid to Ukraine and its allies.
— Russia will cut off natural gas to Finland on Saturday, the Finnish state energy company said, just days after Finland applied to join NATO. Finland had refused Moscow’s demand that it pay for gas in rubles. The cutoff is not expected to have any major immediate effect. Natural gas accounted for just 6% of Finland’s total energy consumption in 2020, Finnish broadcaster YLE said.
— A captured Russian soldier accused of killing a civilian awaited his fate in Ukraine’s first war crimes trial. Sgt. Vadim Shishimarin, 21, could get life in prison.
Meanwhile, fighting intensified deeper in the Donbas.
Serhiy Haidai, the governor of Luhansk, said Russian forces were especially focused on the Lysychansk-Bakhmut highway, the only road for evacuating people and delivering humanitarian supplies.
“The road is extremely important because it’s the only connection to other regions of the country,” he said via email. “The Russians are trying to cut us off from it, to encircle the Luhansk region.”
Russian forces shelled the road constantly from multiple directions, but Ukrainian armored transports were still able to get through, Haidai added.
Moscow’s troops have been trying for weeks to seize Severodonetsk, a key city in the Donbas. One of Friday’s attacks was on a school in Severodonetsk that was sheltering more than 200 people, many of them children, Haidai said. Three adults were killed, he said on Telegram.
Twelve people were killed in Severodonetsk, Haidai said. It was not immediately clear if that included the three at the school. In addition, more than 60 houses were destroyed across the region, he added.
Russian forces now control 90 percent of Luhansk, but the attack on Severodonetsk failed — “the Russians suffered personnel losses and retreated,” Haidai said. His account could not be independently verified.
Another city, Rubizhne, has been “completely destroyed,” Haidai said. “Its fate can be compared to that of Mariupol.”
Pro-Moscow separatists have fought Ukrainian forces in the Donbas for the past eight years and held a considerable swath of it before Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion. But the effort by Putin’s troops to take more territory there has been slow-going.
In a sign of Russia’s frustration with the war, some senior commanders have been fired in recent weeks, Britain’s Defense Ministry said.
Russian forces elsewhere in Ukraine continued to blast away at targets, some of them civilian.
In the village of Velyka Kostromka, west of the Donbas, explosions in the middle of the night Thursday shook Iryna Martsyniuk’s house to its foundations. Roof timbers splintered and windows shattered, sending shards of glass into a wall near three sleeping children.
“There were flashes everywhere,” she said. “There was smoke everywhere.” She grabbed the children and ran toward the home’s entrance, “but the corridor wasn’t there anymore. Instead, we saw the starry night.”
They ran down the road to a neighbor’s home, where they hid in the basement.
Around 20 other houses were damaged and two people were lightly injured, said Olha Shaytanova, head of the village.
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McQuillan reported from Lviv. Stashevskyi reported from Kyiv. Associated Press journalists Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Andrea Rosa in Kharkiv, Jamey Keaten in Geneva and other AP staffers around the world contributed.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
Ukraine said its troops repelled a Russian attack in the grinding, back-and-forth battle for the Donbas, the mostly Russian-speaking expanse of coal mines and factories that the Kremlin is bent on capturing.
Ukrainian troops surrendering at Mariupol registered as POWs
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Hundreds more Ukrainian fighters who made their stand inside Mariupol’s bombed-out steel plant surrendered, bringing the total to over 1,700, Russia said Thursday, amid international fears the Kremlin will take reprisals against the prisoners.
The Red Cross registered hundreds of the soldiers as prisoners of war in a step toward ensuring their humane treatment under the Geneva Conventions.
Meanwhile, in the first war crimes trial held by Ukraine, a captured Russian soldier testified that he shot an unarmed civilian in the head on an officer’s orders, and he asked the victim’s widow to forgive him. The soldier pleaded guilty earlier in the week, but prosecutors presented the evidence against him in line with Ukrainian law.
Also, more U.S. aid appeared to be on its way to Ukraine when the Senate overwhelmingly approved a $40 billion package of military and economic aid for the country and its allies. The House voted for it last week. President Joe Biden’s quick signature was certain.
“Help is on the way, really significant help. Help that could make sure that the Ukrainians are victorious,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
In Mariupol, the nearly three-month siege that turned the strategic port city into a symbol of the war’s horrors drew ever closer to an end as the fighters in the last bastion of resistance continued abandoning the Azovstal steel plant on orders from above to save their lives.
The Russian military said 1,730 Ukrainian troops at the steelworks have surrendered since Monday. At least some were taken by the Russians to a former penal colony in territory controlled by Moscow-backed separatists. A separatist official said others were hospitalized.
It was not clear how many fighters were left in the maze of tunnels and bunkers at the plant. Russia in recent weeks had estimated that it had been battling some 2,000 troops at the steelworks.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said that it registered hundreds of POWs from the plant under an agreement between Russia and Ukraine. It did not say whether it had visited the prisoners.
While Ukraine said it hopes to get the soldiers back in a prisoner swap, Russian authorities have threatened to investigate some for war crimes and put them on trial, branding them “Nazis” and criminals.
The defense of the steel mill has been led by Ukraine’s Azov Regiment, whose far-right origins have been seized on by the Kremlin as part of an effort to cast its invasion as a battle against Nazi influence in Ukraine.
Those threats and accusations have raised fears about the fate of the captured fighters.
Amnesty International had pushed for the Red Cross to be given access to the troops, citing lawless executions allegedly carried out by Russian forces in Ukraine and saying the Azovstal defenders “must not meet the same fate.”
The emptying of the plant would allow Russia to claim complete control of Mariupol, a long-sought victory but one that holds largely symbolic importance at this point since the city is already effectively under Moscow’s control and military analysts say most of the Russian forces that were tied down by the drawn-out fighting have already left.
Still, it would be a clear win in a war that has seen Moscow suffer a series of setbacks in the face of unexpectedly stiff Ukrainian resistance. Kyiv’s troops, bolstered by Western weapons, thwarted Russia’s initial goal of storming the capital and have tied down Moscow’s forces in the Donbas, the eastern industrial region that President Vladimir Putin has set his sights on capturing.
The surprising success of Ukraine’s troops has buoyed Kyiv’s confidence, and a senior official reflected that Thursday.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy who was involved in several rounds of talks with Russia, said in a tweet addressed to Moscow: “Do not offer us a cease-fire — this is impossible without total Russian troops withdrawal.”
“Until Russia is ready to fully liberate occupied territories, our negotiating team is weapons, sanctions and money,” he wrote.
Russia, though, signaled its intent to incorporate or at least maintain influence over areas its forces have seized.
Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin this week visited the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, which have been under the control of Russian forces since shortly after the invasion began in February. He was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying the regions could become part of “our Russian family.”
Also, Volodymyr Saldo, the Kremlin-installed head of the Kherson region, appeared in a video on Telegram saying Kherson “will become a subject of the Russian Federation.”
Sweden and Finland, fearing that Putin’s ambitions extend beyond Ukraine, applied this week to join NATO and gain its protection against Russia, though the process has been thrown into jeopardy by NATO member Turkey.
Turkey has accused the two Nordic countries of harboring or otherwise supporting Kurdish militants and others it considers a threat to its security. Each of NATO’s 30 countries has an effective veto over new members.
“We have told our relevant friends we would say no to Finland and Sweden’s entry into NATO, and we will continue on our path like this,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a video released Thursday.
In other developments, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke by phone on Thursday with his Russian counterpart for the first time since the war began, and they agreed to keep the lines of communications open, the Pentagon said.
On the battlefield, Ukraine’s military said Russian forces pressed their offensive in various sections of the front in the Donbas but were being repelled. The governor of the Luhansk region said Russian shelling killed four civilians, while separatist authorities in Donetsk said Ukrainian shelling killed two.
On the Russian side of the border, the governor of Kursk province said a truck driver was killed by shelling from Ukraine.
In the war crimes trial in Kyiv, Sgt. Vadim Shishimarin, a 21-year-old member of a Russian tank unit, told the court that he shot Oleksandr Shelipov, a 62-year-old Ukrainian civilian, in the head on orders from an officer.
Shishimarin said he disobeyed a first order but felt he had no choice but to obey when it was repeated by another officer. He said he was told the man could pinpoint the troops’ location to Ukrainian forces.
A prosecutor has disputed that Shishimarin was acting under orders, saying the direction didn’t come from a direct commander.
Shishimarin apologized to the victim’s widow, Kateryna Shelipova, who described seeing her husband being shot just outside their home in the early days of Russia’s invasion.
She told the court that she believed Shishimarin deserves a life sentence, the maximum possible, but that she wouldn’t mind if he were exchanged as part of a swap for the defenders of the Azovstal plant.
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McQuillan reported from Lviv. Associated Press journalists Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Andrea Rosa in Kharkiv, and Aamer Madhani in Washington and other AP staffers around the world contributed.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine