Ukraine pledged Sunday to fight to the end in Mariupol after a Russian deadline to surrender remaining soldiers in the southeastern port city where Moscow is pursuing a big strategic triumph expired.
“The city has not yet fallen,” Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said hours after Moscow’s ultimatum for fighters holed up and besieged in a huge fortress-like steelworks to surrender expired.
“Our military forces, our men, remain. As a result, they will fight to the bitter end,” he told ABC’s “This Week,” with Moscow refocusing its military efforts on regaining control of the eastern Donbas region and establishing a land corridor to the already-annexed Crimea.
Russia’s defence ministry stated that up to 400 mercenaries were stationed inside the encircled Azovstal steel plant, pleading with Ukrainian forces to “lay down their arms and surrender in order to save their lives.”
Moscow asserts that Kyiv has directed nationalist Azov battalion troops to “kill on the spot” anyone seeking to surrender.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky stated that if Russian forces eliminate the last of Kyiv’s defenders, a fledgling negotiation process to end nearly two months of fighting will come to an end.
Russian President Vladimir Putin had previously stated that the negotiations had reached a “dead end.”
Shmyhal stated that Ukraine desired a diplomatic settlement “if feasible,” but added, “If the Russians refuse to negotiate, we will fight to the very end.” We will not submit.
Iryna Vereshchuk, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister, pleaded with Russian soldiers to enable evacuations from Mariupol.
“Once again, we urge the establishment of a humanitarian corridor to allow people, particularly women and children, to be evacuated from Mariupol,” Vereshchuk stated.
Zelensky described the situation in Mariupol as “inhuman” and pleaded with the West to deliver heavy weaponry quickly.
Since Russian troops invaded the former Soviet state on February 24, Mariupol has become a symbol of Ukraine’s unexpectedly fierce resistance.
Ukrainian authorities have urged residents of eastern Donbas to flee west in order to avoid a Russian offensive aimed at capturing the region’s composite regions of Donetsk and Lugansk.
Pope Francis called for peace in Ukraine during this “Easter of war” while celebrating Easter Sunday in Rome.
“May there be peace for war-torn Ukraine, which has been so severely tested by the violence and devastation of the barbaric and senseless war into which it has been dragged,” the pontiff said during his traditional Urbi et Orbi address on St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican.
“Let there be a peaceful resolution. May the flexing of muscles in the midst of human suffering come to an end.”
Francis stated that he carries “in my heart all the numerous Ukrainian victims, the millions of refugees and internally displaced persons, the divided families, the elderly left alone, the lives shattered, and the cities razed to the ground. “I see the faces of orphaned children fleeing the war.”
