Yesterday, Ukrainian forces reportedly repelled eight Russian attacks in the two regions, destroying nine tanks, 18 armoured units and 13 vehicles. 9News
officials have condemned Russian missile strikes on the southern port city of Odesa — with one official denouncing them as "Easter gifts from Putin" — amid reports that multiple people had been killed.Ukraine's foreign minister said the only aim of the Odesa strike was "terror" and it comes as Russian forces were attacking a steel plant in Mariupol, in an apparent bid to eliminate the last pocket of resistance in the strategic city.
Many Ukrainians celebrate Easter according to the Julian calendar, with Easter Sunday falling this year on April 24. Arestovich said during a briefing that Russian forces had resumed air strikes on the massive seaside plant and were trying to storm it, which would represent a reversal from an order Russian President Vladimir Putin gave two days earlier.
Earlier Saturday, the Azov Regiment of Ukraine's National Guard, which has members holed up in the plant, released footage of around two dozen women and children, some of whom said they had been in the mill's underground tunnels for two months and longed to see the sun. The footage of Azovstal showed soldiers giving sweets to children who respond with fist-bumps. One young girl says she and her relatives "haven't seen neither the sky, nor the sun" since they left home on February 27.
Russia has pulled a dozen crack military units from Mariupol to bolster the offensive elsewhere in the eastern Donbas region, while other troops continue to keep the remaining Ukrainian troops in the city pinned in the plant, Ukrainian officials said. Firefighters work to extinguish a fire at a shop following a Russian bombardment in Kharkiv, Ukraine.
Russia still has not established air or sea control due to Ukrainian resistance, and despite Putin's declaration of victory in Mariupol, "heavy fighting continues to take place, frustrating Russian attempts to capture the city, thus further slowing their desired progress in the Donbas," the Ministry of Defence said.
Mariupol has taken on outsize importance in the war. Fully capturing it would deprive the Ukrainians of a vital port and allow Russia to create a land corridor with the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014.
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