LAST UPDATE | 3 May 2022
RUSSIAN FORCES LAUNCHED launched a major assault today on the Azovstal steel plant, the last holdout of Ukrainian forces in the devastated southern port city of Mariupol, as 101 civilians who had been trapped in the site for weeks were finally brought to safety.
“We are so thankful for everyone who helped us. There was a moment we lost hope, we thought everyone forgot about us,” evacuee Anna Zaitseva told AFP after arriving in the Ukrainian-held city of Zaporizhzhia, her six-month-old baby in her arms.
The United Nations and Red Cross said 101 people were evacuated from the maze of Soviet-era tunnels underneath the sprawling Azovstal plant as part of a five-day operation.
“Without a doubt, we will continue doing everything we can to get all our people out of Mariupol, out of Azovstal,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a video address.
“It’s hard, but we need everyone, everyone who remains there — civilian and military.”
Another 58 people joined their convoy to Zaporizhzhia from the city of Mangush, outside Mariupol, said Osnat Lubrani, the UN’s Humanitarian coordinator for Ukraine.
She warned there “may be more civilians who remain trapped” in Azovstal, saying the UN was ready to return to bring them to safety.
But Russian forces resumed attacks on the steel plant, where the Ukrainian fighters are making their last stand in Mariupol after almost constant bombardment since Moscow’s invasion on 24 February.
It was one of a series of assaults today across Ukraine, where authorities said 21 civilians were killed in the eastern Donetsk region.
Ukraine’s ‘finest hour’
The war in Ukraine has killed thousands of people and displaced more than 13 million, creating the worst refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.
Western countries have backed Ukraine with cash and weapons while imposing unprecedented sanctions against Russia in a so far failed bid to make President Vladimir Putin pull back.
It comes as UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson became the first foreign leader to address the Ukrainian parliament since the war began in late February, promising £300 million (€358 million) in military aid.
Speaking via video link, Johnson evoked Britain’s fight against the Nazis in World War II in hailing Kyiv’s resistance as its “finest hour”, and vowed to help ensure “no-one will ever dare to attack you again”.
Johnson said Ukraine’s resistance had “exploded the myth” that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces were invincible and “written one of the most glorious chapters in military history and in the life of your country”.
“The so-called irresistible force of Putin’s war machine has broken on the immoveable object of Ukrainian patriotism and love of country,” he added, arguing the Russian leader was “sowing the seeds of catastrophe for himself and for his country”.
The new military support, which will include electronic warfare equipment, a counter battery radar system, GPS jamming equipment and thousands of night vision devices, is the latest defensive aid from London.
It represents a ramping up of support, after previously dispatching around £450 million in military equipment to Kyiv in several stages.
The European Commission meanwhile set out to put to member states a new package of measures, including a phased-out ban on Russian oil, officials said.
The package will also target Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, which will be excluded from the global banking communications system SWIFT.
After talks yesterday, the European Union warned member states to prepare for a possible complete breakdown in gas supplies from Russia, insisting it would not cede to Moscow’s demand that imports be paid for in rubles.
Germany, Europe’s largest economy, was heavily dependent on Russian gas prior to the war, but European views quickly hardened after the invasion.
EU and French officials said the 27-member bloc was united with Poland and Bulgaria, whose gas supplies were cut last week after they refused to pay in rubles.
Deadly factory strike
In the early weeks of the invasion, Russian forces encircled Ukraine’s capital Kyiv but they have shifted to the east, including largely Russian-speaking areas, and the south.
In Donetsk, the regional governor said that 10 of the 21 dead today were killed in shelling of the Avdiivka coke plant, one of the largest in Europe.
In the town of Lyman, Ukrainian soldiers told AFP they have rigged with explosives a railway bridge over the Donets river and were waiting for orders to blow it up.
“It’s never easy to destroy one of your own pieces of infrastructure. But between saving a bridge or protecting a city, there’s no question at all,” said one, going by the nom de guerre of “The Engineer”.
Russia’s defence ministry meanwhile said its forces had struck a logistics centre at a military airfield in the region around the Black Sea port of Odessa, used for the delivery of foreign-made weapons.
Storage facilities containing Turkey’s Bayraktar drones as well as missiles and ammunition from the United States and Europe have been destroyed, it said.
A rocket strike also knocked out power in part of Lviv, the western city near Poland that has turned into a haven due to its comparative calm, Mayor Andriy Sadovy said on Twitter.
Ukrainian prosecutors say they have pinpointed more than 8,000 war crimes carried out by Russian troops and are investigating 10 Russian soldiers for suspected atrocities in the town of Bucha, near Kyiv.
But in a phone call with French President Emmanuel Macron today, Putin accused Ukrainian forces of committing war crimes and claimed the EU was “ignoring” them, according to the Kremlin.
The United States warned on Monday that Moscow was preparing imminently to annex the eastern regions of Lugansk and Donetsk, planning to “engineer referenda” to join Russia sometime in mid-May.
Pro-Russian separatists in the two regions declared independence in 2014, but Moscow has so far stopped short of formally incorporating them as it did that year with the Crimean peninsula.
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