Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered his military to cancel plans to storm the Azovstal plant in the besieged Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, saying he wants it to continue to be securely blockaded instead.
The last Ukrainian hold-outs are sheltering in the city’s huge Azovstal steel plant, reportedly with around 1,000 civilians.
Putin gave the order to seal off the plant to Sergei Shoigu, his defence minister.
He congratulated him on a successful operation in Mariupol after Shoigu claimed that Russian forces had captured the city.
Shoigu had previously told Putin that more than 2,000 Ukrainian fighters were still in the plant, which has an extensive underground bunker.
Putin hailed Russia’s “liberation” of Mariupol after Defence Minister Shoigu said Moscow controls the city apart from the Azovstal steel plant, where Ukrainian soldiers remain.
“Block off this industrial area so that not even a fly can escape,” Putin said.
Leaving the plant in Ukrainian hands, however, robs the Russians of the ability to declare complete victory in Mariupol. The city’s capture has both strategic and symbolic importance.
Ukraine said the Russians dropped heavy bombs to flatten what was left of the sprawling Azovstal steel plant, believed to be the city’s last pocket of resistance.
A few thousand Ukrainian troops, by the Russians’ estimate, remained in the plant and its labyrinth of tunnels and bunkers spread out across about 11 square kilometers (4 square miles). Zelenskyy said about 1,000 civilians were also trapped.
More than 100,000 people overall were believed trapped in Mariupol with little if any food, water, medicine or heat. The city’s pre-war population was 400,000.
Mariupol holds strategic and symbolic value for both sides. The scale of suffering there has made it a worldwide focal point of the war. Mariupol’s fall would deprive Ukraine of a vital port, complete a land bridge between Russia and the Crimean Peninsula, and free up Russian troops to move elsewhere in the Donbas.
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Published on: Thursday, April 21, 2022, 01:23 PM IST
