Defenders inside Ukrainian steel mill refuse to surrender
LVIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian fighters battling Russian forces in the tunnels beneath Mariupol’s immense steel plant refused to surrender in the face of relentless attacks, with the wife of one commander saying they had vowed to “stand till the end.”
The battle, in the last Ukrainian stronghold of the strategic port city reduced to ruins by the Russian onslaught, appeared increasingly desperate on Thursday.
“They won’t surrender,” Kateryna Prokopenko said after speaking by phone to her husband, a leader of the steel plant defenders. “They only hope for a miracle.”
She said her husband, Azov Regiment commander Denys Prokopenko, told her he would love her forever.
“I am going mad from this. It seemed like words of goodbye,” she said.
The bloody battle came amid growing speculation that President Vladimir Putin wants to present the Russian people with a battlefield triumph — or announce an escalation of the war — in time for Victory Day on Monday. Victory Day is the biggest patriotic holiday on the Russian calendar, marking the Soviet Union’s triumph over Nazi Germany.
Some 2,000 Ukrainian fighters, by Russia's most recent estimate, were holed up in a maze of tunnels and bunkers beneath Mariupol's sprawling Azovstal steelworks. A few hundred civilians were also believed trapped there.
“There are many wounded (fighters), but they are not surrendering," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said late Thursday in his nightly video address. “They are holding their positions."
He said the attack was preventing the evacuation of remaining civilians.
“Just imagine this hell! And there are children there,” he said “More than two months of constant shelling, bombing, constant death.”
The Russians managed to get inside with the...
