The Washington Post:Russia tightens grip on Mariupol as Ukraine seeks more Western aid

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MUKACHEVO, Ukraine — Russian forces appeared to tighten their grip on the southern port city of Mariupol on Thursday, with a senior police official describing “constant” attempts to overrun the last Ukrainian forces holding out at the embattled Azovstal steel plant.

© Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters A view shows a damaged facility of Azovstal Iron and Steel Works during Ukraine-Russia conflict in the southern port city of Mariupol, Ukraine, on May 5.

Seizing the plant would give Russia total control of the city — delivering the Kremlin its largest prize in a 10-week-old invasion that has been marked by immense human suffering and logistical failures, and has shifted to focus on eastern Ukraine after attempts to take control elsewhere faltered.

Mykhailo Vershynin, the chief of the Donetsk regional patrol police, said Russian forces had not observed a promised cease-fire in Mariupol, where a slow stream of about 500 evacuations have been reported in recent days. A convoy to free civilians who remain trapped inside the steel plant is planned Friday, said U.N. emergency relief coordinator Martin Griffiths. But it was unclear if Russia would allow it to proceed.

“There is constant storming, with the support of aviation, artillery and armored equipment,” Vershynin said. “The wounded are becoming greater, the situation is becoming critical.”

Drone footage published Thursday by the right-wing Azov Regiment’s Telegram channel showed multiple explosions at the steel plant, with black, white and gray smoke in the air.

Ukrainian forces and their Western partners are girding for a grim next phase of the war, with Russia increasingly desperate for victory and the West rushing more and more aid to Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke to a donor conference in Warsaw that was organized by the prime ministers of Poland and Sweden and raised $7 billion in aid.

Zelensky, speaking remotely, reiterated his call for the European Union to accept Ukraine as a member as quickly as possible and characterized donations to his country as “an investment in the whole of central and Eastern Europe, so the aggressor will know that he will not break the power of Europe and all free nations.”

The war has already prompted other nations located close to Russia to consider fundamental changes in their own security situation. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Thursday that if Sweden follows through with its application to join the security alliance, NATO will increase its security along Sweden’s borders. Finland, already a strong military partner of the United States, also is strongly considering joining the alliance.

“I am convinced that we will find solutions for the security needs Sweden will have in a transitional period,” Stoltenberg told the Swedish public broadcaster SVT. “From the potential moment Sweden is applying, and NATO says that they want Sweden to join, there is a very strong obligation from NATO to be able to guarantee Sweden’s security.”

© Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images A man throws the debris from a broken window as he cleans his room at an apartment damaged by a missile explosion in Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine, on Thursday.

In Belarus, President Alexander Lukashenko — a key ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin — said he did not think the war would “drag on this way,” and that he was doing everything he could to stop the conflict. Belarus served as a staging ground for the war, with some Russian troops invading from Belarusian territory.

But Lukashenko, speaking with the Associated Press, cast himself as pivotal to talks between Moscow and Kyiv. “We have done and are doing everything now so that there isn’t a war,” Lukashenko said in the interview. “Thanks to yours truly — me that is — negotiations between Ukraine and Russia have begun.”

At the Pentagon, spokesman John Kirby said most of the thousands of Russian forces who had been fighting in Mariupol have left and gone north, leaving behind a “small number” of troops — an action that U.S. defense officials previously have said could occur when Russia feels that it has control of the city.

The latest military activity by Russia “largely through airstrikes in and around Mariupol, and certainly at the Azovstal plant,” Kirby said. He added that Russia’s military progress in the eastern Donbas region remains “uneven, plodding, incremental.”

Asked about statements by Ukrainian officials that Russia is planning a parade in Mariupol on Russia’s Victory Day holiday, Kirby said what the Kremlin plans to do or say Monday is “really up to them.”

Elsewhere in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, seven civilians were wounded when Russian forces shelled the Holy Dormition Sviatohirsk Lavra, a centuries-old monastery where refugees have been sheltering, Ukraine’s prosecutor general said Thursday.

The attack was launched Wednesday on the city of Sviatohirsk, in the Kramatorsk district, and is under investigation, according to a Telegram post from the prosecutor general’s office.

The attack occurred during a prayer, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church said in a separate statement, and there was damage to windows and doors in the temples and buildings. The Orthodox Church said 300 refugees live in the monastery, including 50 children. The church noted that the monastery had also suffered damage after airstrikes in the city in mid-March.

Separately, the Kremlin’s new “curator” for Russian-backed “people’s republics,” Sergei Kiriyenko, has arrived in Mariupol, the Russian business newspaper RBC reported. Kiriyenko came to the port city with Andrei Turchak, secretary of the general council of the ruling United Russia party, and took part in a ceremony dedicating a statue of a “grandmother with a Soviet flag,” the news site reported.

The southern Ukrainian city of Kherson also remains under Russian control, with indications that the Kremlin intends to formalize that.

“The Kherson region is moving toward becoming a subject of the Russian Federation,” said Kirill Stremousov, deputy chairman of Kherson’s military-civilian administration, according to an account by the state-controlled news site Gazeta.ru.

Americans continue to serve in the Ukrainian military as volunteers. One of them, Cameron Van Camp, said in an interview Thursday that his colleague, Willy Joseph Cancel, died last week while serving in the International Legion of Territorial Defense, the Ukrainian unit that Zelensky encouraged Western veterans to join.

Cancel, 23, served briefly in the U.S. Marine Corps before his career ended with a court-martial. His death was first reported last week, but few details about it are clear.

Van Camp, 31, told The Washington Post that their unit was involved in a Ukrainian offensive last month to retake Irpin, a suburb of the capital city of Kyiv. The unit also fought around Kherson and Mykolaiv, Van Camp said. He declined to comment on the circumstances of Cancel’s death.

“We were there to support Ukrainian forces,” Van Camp said. “That’s what we did. That’s what our mission was.”

Timsit reported from London and Pannett from Sydney. Adela Suliman, Ellen Francis and Helier Cheung in London, Bryan Pietsch in Seoul and Razzan Nakhlawi in Washington contributed to this report.

Russia tightens grip on Mariupol as Ukraine seeks more Western aid (msn.com)