Fears grow of Mariupol's fall to Russia

LVIVI (NYTIMES, REUTERS) - The southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol is on the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe and must be completely evacuated, its mayor said on Monday (March 28).

Mayor Vadym Boichenko said about 160,000 civilians were trapped in the city without power. Twenty-six buses were waiting to evacuate civilians, but Russian forces had not agreed to give them safe passage, he said.

“The Russian Federation is playing with us,” he said.

Russia denies targeting civilians and blames Ukraine for the repeated failure to agree on safe corridors for trapped civilians.

Mariupol is widely seen as a strategic prize for the Russian invaders to create a bridge between Crimea, annexed by Moscow in 2014, and two separatist enclaves in eastern Ukraine.

Ukraine announced no plans to try to create safe corridors anywhere in the country on Monday, making clear it feared Russian attacks.

“Our intelligence has reported possible ‘provocations’ by the occupiers on the humanitarian corridor routes. So, for reasons of public safety, we are not opening any humanitarian corridors today,” said Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk.

The disposition of Russian forces in Ukraine during the last 24 hours has seen no significant change, British military intelligence said on Monday.

However, Russia has gained more ground in the south, in the vicinity of Mariupol, as it fights to capture the port, the defence ministry added.

On Sunday, Russian forces redoubled attacks on strategic targets across Ukraine, with fierce fighting reported around the capital, Kyiv.

As the conflict moved into its second month, Russian forces have largely failed in their first aim to take the largest cities and have narrowed immediate targets to the sieges of the southern port city of Mariupol and the strategically placed city of Chernihiv in the north.

Air raid sirens rang out in Kyiv during the day, but otherwise the city remained calm, lending some credence to the Russian Defence Ministry's recent assertion that it was turning its focus away from Kyiv to concentrate on the eastern front.

Some Russian units were withdrawing to Belarus in the north to regroup and re-equip, according to the Ukrainian military, but heavy Russian artillery attacks continued around Chernihiv, northeast of Kyiv.

Seven people, including two children, died in artillery fire in Kharkiv, in northeast Ukraine, as Russian forces tried to subdue the city near Russia's border, the Ukrainian news media reported. And missiles hit a fuel depot in western Ukraine as Russia continued to use airstrikes to disrupt supply lines to Ukrainian forces.

Ukraine's top military intelligence officer suggested that Russia was changing its military focus to the south and east and might be trying to divide Ukraine between occupied and non-occupied territories.

"In fact, this is an attempt to create North and South Korea in Ukraine," said Brigadier General Kyrylo Budanov, the head of the intelligence division of Ukraine's Ministry of Defence.

Fighting across the country showed Russian forces were working to consolidate their positions in key spots north of Kyiv and resisting Ukrainian attempts to break their grip there while focusing fully on seizing control of Mariupol. After weeks of siege in the port city, Ukrainian soldiers and civilians trapped there were facing increasingly dire conditions, without food and water, forcing people to use untreated sewage water to survive.

Western military analysts and Ukrainian officials have repeatedly emphasised that Russian forces have suffered heavy losses and have been thwarted in their primary objectives: to wrest control of the country's main cities, including Kyiv.

Struggling with difficulties in their supply lines, Russian forces are having to move slowly and focus on one target at a time, said Jack Watling, a research fellow and specialist in land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute in Britain.

Still, Ukrainian forces, despite their successes in ambushing and stalling Russian units around the country, have not been able to reverse Russian gains in any significant way, he added.

In an interview with Russian journalists on Sunday, Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said Russian forces had entered parts of Mariupol and that he had told Ukrainian soldiers still holding out there that they could abandon the city to save their own lives.

"I talk to them twice a day," he said. "I told them, 'If you feel that you need to get out and that it is right, that you can survive, then do it. I understand'. " He added that the officers refused to go because they did not want to leave dead and wounded comrades and civilians behind. He made the remarks in an interview with several independent journalists that was published on the YouTube channel Zygar.

Watling said he did not expect Ukrainian forces to hold Mariupol any longer than a few more days.

"They ran out of water, they ran out of food a while ago," he said. "Exhausted troops on sewage water - you cannot fight long on that." He added that he expected an insurgency to continue in the city after it falls.

As the war ground on, its physical toll on Ukraine was becoming more apparent. An estimated US$63 billion (S$86 billion) in Ukrainian infrastructure had been damaged or destroyed as of last Thursday, Ukraine's parliament said in a Twitter post on Sunday.

The losses include more than 4,400 residential buildings, 138 health care facilities, eight civilian airports and 378 educational institutions. The cost was calculated by the Kyiv School of Economics.

After a month of intense fighting near Kyiv, some Russian military units were withdrawing to Belarus to regroup, travelling through the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the Ukrainian military said.

"These measures are taken to rotate units that have suffered significant losses, strengthen existing groups, replenish food, fuel and ammunition and evacuate wounded and sick soldiers," the military said in a statement.

It also said that the Russian army was using the site of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor for logistics. Russian troops have blockaded the town of Slavutich, which is close to the Chernobyl station, and have escalated attacks on Chernihiv in an apparent attempt to consolidate a band of control north of the capital.

Ukraine's chief negotiator at peace talks with Russia said a new round of negotiations would take place this week, starting on Monday in Turkey, a Nato member that has used President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's good relations with both Russia and Ukraine to try to mediate a solution to the conflict. But Turkish officials have conceded that any agreement between the two parties remains distant.

Budanov, Ukraine's military intelligence chief, predicted the Ukrainian army would repel Russian forces as the fighting descended into an all-out guerrilla war.

"The season of a total Ukrainian guerrilla safari will soon begin," he said. "Then there will be one relevant scenario left for the Russians: how to survive."