LAST UPDATE | 2 May 2022
RUSSIA IS PLANNING TO imminently “annex” the two eastern regions of Ukraine battered by its invasion after failing to overthrow the Kyiv government, a senior US official said today.
“According to the most recent reports, we believe that Russia will try to annex the ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ and ‘Luhansk People’s Republic’ to Russia,” said Michael Carpenter, the US ambassador to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
“The reports state that Russia plans to engineer referenda upon joining sometime in mid-May,” he told reporters in Washington.
Ukrainian authorities were today hoping to evacuate more civilians from the besieged southern port city of Mariupol but this was delayed, as Russia’s offensive in the east of Ukraine continued with “active and heavy” fighting.
Kyiv said more than 100 civilians were evacuated over the weekend from the sprawling Azovstal plant, the last holdout of Ukrainian forces in Mariupol which has been surrounded by Russian forces since they invaded Ukraine on 24 February.
They were awaited today in Ukraine-controlled Zaporizhzhia, where vehicles from Unicef and other international NGOs were on standby.
In coordinated efforts between Ukraine, Russia and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), another evacuation had been hoped to start first thing on Monday but by lunchtime, there was no sign of movement.
Several hundred Ukrainian soldiers and civilians have been sheltering in the maze of Soviet-era underground tunnels underneath the steelworks, many of whom require medical attention.
“For the first time, there were two days of real ceasefire on this territory. More than 100 civilians have already been evacuated — women and children first of all,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said late on Sunday.
The Russian armed forces said 46 civilians had left Azovstal on Saturday, and had “voluntarily” decided to stay in the separatist region of Donetsk.
Another 80 people got out on Sunday — of whom 69 left for Kyiv-controlled territory, it said. They were “handed over to UN and ICRC representatives”, the Russian ministry said earlier.
Mariupol is an important strategic hub connecting the Russian-held southern and eastern parts of Ukraine and has seen some of the worst of the fighting.
With the Russian siege leaving residents in dire conditions, with little access to food, water and medicine, the city has become emblematic of a war that has uprooted more than 13 million people from their homes and killed thousands.
A teenage boy was killed in a fresh Russian strike on Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Odessa, the southern city’s council said on social media this evening.
“As a result of a missile strike in Odessa, a residential building which had five people in it at the time of the attack was damaged. A 15-year-old boy died,” Odessa city council said on Telegram.
Meanwhile, EU ministers met today to respond to Russia cutting gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria — and discuss plans for a possible oil embargo to punish Moscow for invading Ukraine.
The energy ministers from the 27 member states were coordinating efforts to counter what Brussels has branded the Kremlin’s bid to “blackmail” the West with threatened energy shortages.
The EU is also working on a phased ban on Russian oil imports, hoping to cut off funding for its war effort and assert energy independence from Moscow.
‘Active and heavy fighting’
After failing to take the capital Kyiv in the first few weeks of the war, Moscow’s army has refocused on the east of Ukraine, notably the Donbas region, which includes the pro-Russian separatist areas of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Fighting is particularly intense around Izyum, Lyman and Rubizhne, as the Russians prepare their attack on Severodonetsk, the last easterly city still held by Kyiv, Ukraine’s general staff said.
“The situation in the Luhansk region can be described in a few words — active and heavy fighting continues,” the defence ministry added.
The governor of Luhansk has said he expected more intense battles ahead of 9 May, the day Russia celebrates the 1945 surrender of Nazi Germany to allied forces, including the then Soviet Union.
However, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Italian television late yesterday that Moscow’s forces “will not artificially adjust their actions to any date, including Victory Day”.
In the same interview, asked about Moscow’s stated aim with the conflict to “de-Nazify” and “de-militarise” Ukraine, Lavrov claimed that Adolf Hitler may have “had Jewish blood”.
Foreign Minister Yair Lapid of Israel — which has sought to keep a delicate balance between the two sides in the conflict — condemned the remarks as erroneous, “unforgivable and outrageous“.
Zelenskyy address
“Today, for the first time in all the days of the war, this vitally needed green corridor has started working,” Zelenskyy said yesterday in a pre-recorded address published on his Telegram messaging channel.
At least some of the people evacuated from the plant were apparently taken to a village controlled by Moscow-backed separatists, though Russian state media reported they would be allowed to continue on to Ukrainian-held territory if they wanted to.
In the past, Ukrainian officials have accused Moscow’s troops of forcibly relocating civilians from areas they have captured to Russia; Moscow has said the people wanted to go to Russia.
While official evacuations have often faltered, many people have managed to flee Mariupol under their own steam in recent weeks.
Others are unable to escape.
“People without cars cannot leave. They’re desperate,” said Olena Gibert, who was among those arriving at a UN-backed reception centre in Zaporizhzhia in dusty and often damaged private cars.
“You need to go get them. People have nothing. We had nothing.”
She said many people still in Mariupol wish to escape the Russian-controlled city but cannot say so openly amid the atmosphere of constant pro-Russian propaganda.
A siege of the city since the early days of the war has trapped civilians in terrible conditions, with scarce access to food, water, medicine and electricity.
They have suffered intense bombardment, including a Russian air strike on a maternity hospital and the bombing of a theatre.
Anastasiia Dembytska, who took advantage of the brief ceasefire around the evacuation of civilians from the steel plant to leave with her daughter, nephew and dog, told the Associated Press (AP) her family survived by cooking on a makeshift stove and drinking well water.
She said she could see the steel plant from her window, when she dared to look out.
“We could see the rockets flying” and clouds of smoke over the plant, she said.
A defender of the plant said Russian forces resumed shelling the plant on Sunday as soon as some civilians there were evacuated.
Denys Shlega, commander of the 12th Operational Brigade of Ukraine’s National Guard, said in a televised interview that several hundred civilians remain trapped alongside nearly 500 wounded soldiers and “numerous” dead bodies.
“Several dozen small children are still in the bunkers underneath the plant,” Shlega said.
It was unclear whether there would be further evacuation attempts.
Before the weekend evacuation, about 1,000 civilians were also believed to be in the sprawling, Soviet-era steel plant, along with an estimated 2,000 Ukrainian fighters.
As many as 100,000 people may still be in Mariupol overall.
The city, which had a pre-war population of more than 400,000, is a key Russian target because its capture would deprive Ukraine of a vital port, allow Moscow to establish a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014, and free up troops for fighting elsewhere in the Donbas, now Russia’s main focus.
A Ukrainian officer at the plant urged groups such as the UN and the Red Cross to ensure the evacuation of wounded fighters, though he acknowledged that reaching some of the injured is difficult.
“There’s rubble. We have no special equipment. It’s hard for soldiers to pick up slabs weighing tons only with their arms,” Sviatoslav Palamar, deputy commander of the Azov Regiment, told the AP in an interview.
“We hear voices of people who are still alive” inside shattered buildings.
The Azov Regiment originated as a far-right paramilitary unit and is now part of the Ukrainian military.
‘Extermination’
In his nightly address yesterday, Zelenskyy accused Moscow of waging “a war of extermination”, saying Russian shelling had hit food, grain and fertiliser warehouses, and residential neighbourhoods in the city of Kharkiv, in the Donbas and other regions.
After failing to capture Kyiv in the opening weeks of the war, Russian forces have embarked on a major military operation to seize the Donbas, Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland where Moscow-backed separatists have been battling Ukrainian forces since 2014.
The Russian Defence Ministry said its forces struck dozens of military targets in eastern Ukraine in the past 24 hours, including concentrations of troops and weapons and an ammunition depot near Chervone in the Zaporizhzhia region.
The information could not be independently verified.
The Ukrainian president’s office said at least three people were killed and another three, including a child, were wounded in the eastern Luhansk region over the last 24 hours.
It said that four people were wounded in the shelling in Donetsk, another eastern region.
The regional administration in the Zaporizhzhia region farther west said that at least two people died and another four were wounded in the Russian shelling of the town of Orikhiv.
A full picture of the battle unfolding in eastern Ukraine is hard to capture.
The fighting makes it dangerous for reporters to move around, and both sides have introduced tight restrictions on reporting from the combat zone.
Western officials say Russia is advancing slowly in its eastern offensive and has captured some villages, but is inflicting heavy civilian casualties through indiscriminate bombing.
Ukrainian forces are fighting their offensive village-by-village while civilians flee air strikes and artillery shelling.
Contains reporting from Press Association
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