(AP) — A new international effort raced Friday to rescue more civilians from the tunnels under a besieged steel plant in Mariupol and the city at large, even as fighters holed up at the sprawling complex made their last stand to prevent Moscow’s complete takeover of the strategic port.
The fight in the last Ukrainian stronghold of a city reduced to ruins by the Russian onslaught appeared increasingly desperate amid growing speculation that President Vladimir Putin wants to finish the battle for Mariupol so he can present a triumph to the Russian people in time for Monday’s Victory Day, the biggest patriotic holiday on the Russian calendar.
Some 2,000 Ukrainian fighters, by Russia’s most recent estimate, are holed up in a vast maze of tunnels and bunkers beneath Azovstal steelworks — and they have repeatedly refused to surrender. Ukraine said a few hundred civilians were also trapped there — and as the battle has ramped up in recent days, fears for their safety have only grown.
U.N. officials announced Thursday that they were launching a third effort to evacuate citizens from the plant and the city. But on Friday, the U.N. did not divulge any new details of the operation; they have been similarly quiet about previous ones while they were ongoing.
“We conducted another stage of a complex operation to evacuate people from Mariupol and Azovstal,” the head of Ukraine’s presidential office, Andriy Yermak, said Friday on the Telegram messaging app. “I can say that we managed to take out almost 500 civilians.”
Two previous evacuations by the United Nations and the Red Cross brought roughly 500 people from the steel plant and elsewhere in Mariupol. It was not clear if Yermak was saying more people have since been rescued. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has vowed to continue to “do all we can to get people out of these hellscapes.”Fighters defending the plant said on Telegram that Russian troops fired on an evacuation vehicle that was moving through the territory of the plant.
“This car was moving towards civilians in order to evacuate them from the territory of the plant. As a result of the shelling, 1 soldier was killed and 6 wounded,” the message from the Azov Regiment said.
Moscow, which has denied storming the facility, did not immediately acknowledge renewed fighting there Friday.
People escaping Mariupol typically have to pass through contested areas and many checkpoints — sometimes taking days to reach relative safety in the Ukrainian-controlled city of Zaporizhzhia, about 140 miles (230 kilometers) to the northwest, where many have gathered.
