Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed “success” in Mariupol but ordered his forces not to storm the site where the last pocket of Ukrainian resistance in the besieged port city is holding out, US based NBC News has reported.
In a rare televised meeting at the Kremlin on Thursday, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu told Putin that the sprawling Azovstal steel plant was “securely blocked” while the rest of the strategically vital city was “liberated.”
Putin said that rather than risk Russian soldiers’ lives by launching a final ground assault, they should instead blockade the stronghold “so that not even a fly comes through.”
Ukrainian forces have held out under weeks of heavy bombardment that have decimated much of Mariupol and prompted international condemnation of Moscow’s tactics.
Kyiv has been desperately seeking ways to evacuate the soldiers and thousands of civilians still trapped in the city without much food or aid.
The fate of Mariupol and the broader Russian offensive in the east has prompted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to call again for urgent supplies of weapons from his country’s allies — an appeal the U.S. looks set to meet, with President Joe Biden announcing a new $800 million military aid package in remarks Thursday morning.
Another report by Los Angeles Times said
Ukraine’s government did not confirm the Russian assertion of a complete takeover of the once-thriving coastal city, which has been nearly wiped out in the course of nonstop attack.
But Putin’s announcement that troops would not storm the sprawling Azovstal steel plant — where both Ukrainian forces and civilians are holed up — was at once a sign of Russian confidence in its grip on Mariupol and of the fierce resistance of local defenders who have refused the enemy’s demands to surrender.
Control of Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, has been among Russia’s key strategic goals since it launched its war on Ukraine exactly eight weeks ago.
The former metropolis of nearly half a million people — now a sea of rubble with three-fourths of its population displaced or dead — would allow Russia to create a land corridor connecting Russian-controlled parts of eastern Ukraine to Crimea, the peninsula Moscow illegally seized in 2014 in a foreshadowing of the present conflict.
