Russia's defence ministry said Friday that the army and its separatist allies had made a breakthrough in Mariupol, which has been under Russian shelling for days, and were now inside the city, with "units of the Donetsk People's Republic, with the support of the Russian armed forces" also "squeezing the encirclement" the ministry said.
On the ground, its mayor has told the BBC fighting has now reached the city centre
Earlier, Ukrainian human rights ombudswoman Lyudmyla Denisova on Friday said 130 people had been rescued so far from the rubble of a theatre in the besieged city of Mariupol, after Ukraine said a powerful Russian air strike hit the building where hundreds of people had been sheltering from the war on Thursday. On Friday evening, rescuers were still searching for hundreds of people trapped.
The fear from Western officials had long been that the level of Ukrainian resistance in the besieged port city of Mariupol was finally softening.
The situation continues to be desperate and should Mariupol fall, it would provide Russia with an effective land corridor stretching for most of the south coast and up the eastern regions of Ukraine.
So it is strategically significant. But the thought from Western officials is that Russian forces are spreading themselves quite thin, soldier-wise on the ground.
The eastern city of Kharkiv is continuing to repel Russian attacks, the same in Sumy to the north-east, and the Kremlin is getting frustrated.
Earlier, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Russian forces were blockading Ukraine's largest cities to create a “humanitarian catastrophe” with the aim of persuading Ukrainians to cooperate with them.
He said that the Russians are preventing supplies from reaching surrounded cities in the center and southeast of the country.
“This is a totally deliberate tactic,” Zelenskyy said in his nighttime video address to the nation, filmed outside in Kyiv, with the presidential office in the lamplight behind him.
He said more than 9,000 people were able to leave besieged Mariupol in the past day, and in all more than 180,000 people have been able to flee to safety through humanitarian corridors.
He again appealed to Russian President Vladimir Putin to hold talks with him directly. “It’s time to meet, time to speak,” he said. “I want to be heard by everyone, especially in Moscow.”
Meanwhile, The Associated Press reported that in Mariupol, Ukrainian and Russian forces are fighting for the Azovstal steel plant, one of the biggest in Europe, said Vadym Denysenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, in televised remarks on Saturday.
“Now there is a fight for Azovstal. I can say that we have lost this economic giant. In fact, one of the largest metallurgical plants in Europe is actually being destroyed,” Denysenko said.
