Ukraine fights to hold off Russian advances in south, east
KHARKIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian forces fought Saturday to hold off a Russian advance in their country’s south and east, where the Kremlin is seeking to capture the industrial Donbas region and Western military analysts said Moscow’s offensive was going much slower than planned.
KHARKIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian forces fought Saturday to hold off a Russian advance in their country’s south and east, where the Kremlin is seeking to capture the industrial Donbas region and Western military analysts said Moscow’s offensive was going much slower than planned.
The United Nations continued trying to broker an evacuation of civilians from the increasingly hellish ruins of Mariupol, a southern port city that Russia has sought to capture since it invaded Ukraine more than nine weeks ago.
Citizens are “begging to get saved” from a steel plant that has become Mariupol’s last defense stronghold, Mayor Vadym Boichenko said Friday. “There, it’s not a matter of days. It’s a matter of hours.” An estimated 2,000 fighters were holed up in the plant with about 1,000 civilians. Two Ukrainian women whose husbands are members of the Azov Regiment of Ukraine’s National Guard said they feared soldiers will be tortured and killed if left behind and captured by the Russians. They asked for a Dunkirk-style mission to evacuate the fighters, a reference to the World War II operation launched to rescue surrounded Allied troops in northern France. “We can do this extraction operation ... which will save our soldiers, our civilians, our kids,” Kateryna Prokopenko, 27, told The Associated Press. “We need to do this right now, because people — every hour, every second — are dying.”
In other developments:
— Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview that Russian and Ukrainian negotiators talk “almost every day.” However, he told Chinese state news agency Xinhua that “progress has not been easy.”
— A former U.S. Marine was killed while fighting alongside Ukrainian forces, his family said, in what would be the war’s first known death of an American in combat. The U.S. has not confirmed the report.— The mayor of the town of Popasna in eastern Ukraine, Nikolai Khanatov, says two buses that were headed there to evacuate residents were fired upon and that contact with the drivers has been lost.
— Russian air-defense forces detected a Ukrainian military plane over Russia’s Bryansk region and tried to repel the aircraft. Two shells fell on a village, regional Gov. Alexander Bogomaz said. No one was injured, but an oil terminal suffered some damage, Bogomaz said.