The United Nations has continued to try to mediate the evacuation of civilians from the extensive Soviet-era factory and other bombed-out ruins of Mariupol, a port city that Russia has sought to seize and bombard since it invaded more than nine weeks. There are up to 1,000 civilians at the Azovstal steel plant, according to Ukrainian officials, who have not said how many fighters remained in the only part of Mariupol that is not occupied by Russian forces. The Russians increased the number of Ukrainian soldiers in the factory to about 2,000. Videos and images shared with the Associated Press by two Ukrainians who said their husbands were among the fighters there show wounded men with stained bandages in need of replacement. others had open wounds or amputated limbs. Skeleton medical staff treated at least 600 wounded, the women said, who identified their husbands as members of Ukraine’s Azov National Guard Regiment. Some of the wounds were rotting with gangrene, they said. In the video shared by the women, the unidentified injured men tell the camera that they eat once a day and share just 1.5 liters (50 ounces) of water a day between four. Supplies within the excluded are running out, they said. The AP could not independently verify the date and location of the video, which the women said was taken last week in the passages below the steelworks. A man without a shirt spoke with obvious pain as he described his wounds: two broken ribs, a pierced lung and a dislocated arm “hanging in the flesh”. “I want to tell everyone who sees this. “If you do not stop here in Ukraine, it will go further, in Europe.” In other developments: – Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in an interview that Russian and Ukrainian negotiators talk “almost every day.” However, he told China’s state-run Xinhua news agency 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 first known American death in the war. The United States has not confirmed the report. – Two buses heading to the town of Popasna in eastern Ukraine to evacuate residents came under fire and contact with drivers was lost, said Mayor Nikolai Hanatov. – Russian air defense forces located a Ukrainian military plane over the Bryansk region of Russia and tried to repel the aircraft. Two shells hit a village, said regional governor Alexander Bogomaz. No one was injured, but one oil terminal was damaged, Bogomaz said. It was difficult to get a complete picture of the unfolding battle in the east, because air raids and artillery barricades have made the movement of journalists extremely dangerous. Both Ukraine and Moscow-backed rebels fighting in the east have also imposed severe restrictions on reports from the battle zone. However, Western military analysts have suggested that Moscow’s attack on the eastern Donbass region, which includes Mariupol, was proceeding much more slowly than planned. So far, Russian troops and Moscow-backed separatist forces in the region since 2014 appear to have made only small gains in the month since Moscow said it would focus its military presence in eastern Ukraine. Numerically, Russia’s military manpower far exceeds that of Ukraine. In the days before the start of the war, Western intelligence estimated that Russia had deployed up to 190,000 troops near the border. Ukraine’s permanent army is about 200,000, spread across the country. Partly due to the persistence of the Ukrainian resistance, the US believes that the Russians are “at least several days behind where they wanted to be” as they try to encircle Ukrainian troops in the east, said a senior US defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity. to discuss the US military assessment. The British Ministry of Defense offered a similar conclusion in its daily assessment of the war, saying it believed that Russian forces in Ukraine were likely to suffer from “weakened morale”, along with a lack of unit-level skills and “inconsistent air support”. He did not say on what basis he made the assessment. With plenty of firepower still in reserve, Russia’s promised offensive could intensify and overwhelm the Ukrainians. In total, the Russian army has about 900,000 active-duty personnel. Russia also has a much larger air force and navy than Ukraine and has regular nuclear weapons. The President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy acknowledged this in his night speech. “If the Russian invaders succeed in carrying out their plans, at least in part, they will still have enough artillery and aircraft to destroy the whole of Donbass. “As they destroyed Mariupol,” he said. “The city, which was one of the most developed in the region, is just a Russian concentration camp in the middle of the rubble,” Zelensky said. In Mariupol, about 100,000 people are believed to still be in the city with little food, water or medicine. UN spokesman Farhan Haq said the organization was negotiating with authorities in Moscow and Kyiv to create the conditions for safe passage. Ukraine has blamed the failure of several previous evacuation attempts on the ongoing Russian bombing. For those in a steelworks, a huge underground network of tunnels and warehouses has provided security from air raids. But the situation has become more dire after the Russians dropped “bunker busters” and other bombs on the factory, the mayor said on Friday. The women, who said their husbands were in the steel plant as part of Azov’s constitution, said they feared soldiers would be tortured and killed if they were left behind and captured by the Russians. They called for a Dunkirk-type mission to evacuate the fighters, a reference to the World War II operation launched to rescue the besieged Allied troops in northern France. “We can do this mining operation … that will save our soldiers, our citizens, our children,” Katerina Prokopenko, 27, told the AP in Rome. “We have to do this now, because people – every hour, every second – are dying.” Azov’s constitution, which helps defend the steel plant, has its roots in the Azov Order, which was formed in 2014 by far-right activists at the start of the separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine. Russian officials have referred to the constitution as trying to justify its activities in eastern Ukraine. Despite the intensity of the fighting in the east, some Ukrainians tried to return to the war zone, going against the current of almost 5.5 million people who have fled the country after the invasion of Russia. “Everything is there. Our roots are there “, a 75-year-old man who intends to cross the first line from Zaporizhia with his wife to reach his home in Donetsk. “Even people from Mariupol want to return.”
Associated Press reporters Jon Gambrell and Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Mstyslav Chernov in Kharkiv, Yesica Fisch in Sloviansk, Lolita C. Baldor in Washington, Trisha Thompson in Rome and AP staff around the world contributed to this report.
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