A Ukrainian officials says more civilians have been rescued from the tunnels under a besieged steel plant in Mariupol
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.
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 to the northwest. The Ukrainian military's General Staff said Friday that its forces repelled 11 attacks in the Donbas and destroyed tanks and armored vehicles, further frustrating Putin's ambitions afterUkrainian chief of defense, Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, meanwhile, said Thursday that a counteroffensive could begin to push Russian forces away from Kharkiv and Izyum — two cities key to the Russian campaign in the Donbas, where Moscow-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian troops for eight years.
In fact, the extended standoff at the plant in Mariupol was helping to hinder Russia's plans for the Donbas, the British Defense Ministry said in an assessment on Friday. “They won’t surrender,” Kateryna Prokopenko said Thursday after speaking by phone to her husband, Denys Prokopenko. “They only hope for a miracle.”“There are many wounded , but they are not surrendering,” he said. “They are holding their positions.”
The Russians managed to get inside the plant Wednesday with the help of an electrician who knew the layout, said Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s Internal Affairs Ministry.
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