Intense street fighting hampered efforts to free hundreds of survivors trapped inside a bombed-out theater on Saturday as Ukrainian forces fought back against larger Russian forces in the strategically important southern port city of Mariupol.
On a day of Vladimir Putin’s meager battlefield victories, Ukraine admitted that after the fierce fighting in Mariupol, it was denied access to the Sea of Azov for the first time, a potentially important prize for Russia.
On Saturday, street fighting raged in the port, most of which stopped after several weeks of bombing by Russian troops. The most visible target remains Mariupol’s main municipal theater, which was bombed on Wednesday despite also being used as a shelter for women and children.
Hundreds are still missing, with over 1,000 survivors believed to be trapped in the building.
The UN World Food Program (WFP) has become the latest humanitarian agency to express frustration at not being allowed to reach tens of thousands of people trapped in a city now completely surrounded by Russian troops.
Jacob Kern, WFP’s emergency coordinator, described Russia’s tactics to prevent emergency food supplies to Mariupol as “unacceptable in the 21st century.” People’s Deputy of Ukraine Dmitry Gurin described the conditions in the city as “medieval”.
Ukrainian rearguard action in Mariupol is increasingly symbolic of a wider conflict, experts say, as the Russian offensive appears to have stalled across much of the country. The British defense assessment said the Kremlin was “surprised by the scale and ferocity of Ukrainian resistance.”
Updates across Ukraine indicated little change in positions on the front lines, with hotspots in the southern cities of Kherson and Mykolaiv, where dozens of bodies were still being recovered from the rubble after a missile attack on a Ukrainian barracks, and in Mariupol.
Capturing the port would give the Russians the entire northern coast of the Sea of Azov, cut off Ukraine from a channel to the Black Sea, and also allow the Kremlin to build a land corridor to Crimea, a peninsula it illegally annexed in 2014.
In the capital Kyiv, Russian plans to encircle the capital still seemed to be far from being realized. The latest Ukrainian defense assessments have shown that 35 markets and 635 shops remain open as the city hopes to weather a possible siege.
However, some Russian elements managed to break through its defenses. Ukrainian forces in Kyiv announced that they had detained 127 “saboteurs” since the beginning of the Russian invasion, including 14 sabotage groups.
One troubling development has been the use by Russia of advanced hypersonic missiles capable of penetrating air defenses to strike an underground weapons depot in western Ukraine. Defense experts have warned that it has “the means to further escalate” the conflict, as the Ukrainian army will not be able to defend itself against attacks from such missiles. The use of these weapons preceded new attempts to resolve the conflict. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called for “meaningful and honest” talks with Moscow.
Seemingly trying to use Putin’s lackluster military successes as an excuse for negotiations, Zelenskiy warned that it would take Russia “several generations” to recover from war losses.
But Putin accused Ukraine of slipping by presenting unrealistic proposals in a phone call with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
Elsewhere, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused the US of discouraging Kyiv from agreeing to Russia’s demands, although he provided no evidence to support this claim.
Most Western analysts believe that Russian troops have already suffered significant losses. Western officials say they have evidence of a decline in morale among Russian fighters, as well as severe logistical problems.
Ukrainian forces claim they have killed a fifth Russian general, Lieutenant General Andrei Mordvichev. If true, he would be the highest-ranking Russian commander to die in the conflict.