Kyiv April 24 2022: Russia resumed its assault on the last Ukrainian defenders holed up in a giant steel works in Mariupol on Saturday, days after Moscow declared victory in the southern city and said its forces did not need to take the plant.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the country’s army was not ready to try break through the siege of the port city by force. But he told an evening news conference that Kyiv had every right to do so.
Zelenskiy also announced that the top American diplomat, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin would visit Kyiv on Sunday and that he planned to discuss the types of weapons Ukraine needs to battle the Russian invasion and he expected concrete results.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has not yet confirmed any travel plans for Blinken and Austin. The U.S. State Department declined to comment on the matter. The Pentagon also declined comment.
The attack on Mariupol, the biggest battle of the conflict, has raged for weeks as Russia seeks to capture a city seen as vital to its attempts to link the eastern Donbas region with Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula Moscow seized in 2014.
Moscow-backed separatists have held territory in the Donbas region for years.
In the Black Sea port city of Odesa, at least eight people were killed, Zelenskiy said. Two missiles struck a military facility and two residential buildings and two more were destroyed on Saturday, the Ukrainian armed forces said.
The death toll could not be independently verified. The last big strike on or near Odesa was in early April.
“The only aim of Russian missile strikes on Odesa is terror,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote on Twitter. Russia has denied targeting civilians in its “special military operation” that began on Feb. 24.
The Russian defence ministry said it used high-precision missiles on Saturday to destroy a logistics terminal in Odesa where a large number of weapons supplied by the United States and European nations were being stored.
It also said Russian forces had killed up to 200 Ukrainian troops and destroyed more than 30 vehicles on Saturday.
Russian General Rustam Minnekayev on Friday said Moscow wanted control of the whole of southern Ukraine, comments Ukraine said indicated Russia had wider goals than its declared aim of demilitarising and “denazifying” the country. Kyiv and the West call the invasion an unjustified war of aggression.
