Fresh effort underway to free civilians trapped inside Mariupol steelworks

Ukraine said a new attempt was underway on Friday to evacuate civilians trapped in a heavily bombed steel mill in the city of Mariupol, after bloody fighting with Russian forces thwarted efforts to bring them to safety the previous day.

Mariupol, a strategic southern port on the Azov Sea, has endured the most destructive siege of the 10-week-old war, and the sprawling Soviet-era Azovstal steel plant is the last part of the city still in the hands of holdout Ukrainian fighters.

Some 2,000 Ukrainian fighters — by Russia's most recent estimate — are believed to be still holed up in the underground tunnels and bunkers.

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UN-brokered evacuations of some of the hundreds of civilians who had taken shelter in the plant's network of tunnels and bunkers began last weekend, but were halted in recent days by renewed fighting.

"The next stage of rescuing our people from Azovstal is underway at the moment. Information about the results will be provided later," said Andriy Yermak, head of the Ukrainian presidential staff. He gave no more details.

Russia has turned its heaviest firepower on Ukraine's east and south, after failing to take the capital Kyiv in the early weeks following its Feb. 24 invasion. The new front is aimed at limiting Ukraine's access to the Black Sea, vital for its grain and metals exports, and linking Russian-controlled territory in the east to the Crimean Peninsula, seized by Moscow in 2014.

Moscow calls its actions a "special military operation" to disarm Ukraine and rid it of anti-Russian nationalism fomented by the West. Ukraine and the West say Russia launched an unprovoked war of aggression. More than five million Ukrainians have fled abroad since the start of the invasion.

Ukraine's general staff said on Friday that Russian forces were continuing their "attempts to fully take over the Donetsk and Luhansk regions," areas in the east partially seized by Moscow-backed separatists in 2014.

Russia's defence ministry said it had destroyed a large ammunition depot in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk in a missile strike. It also said its air defences shot down two Ukrainian warplanes in the Luhansk region.

It was not possible to independently verify either side's statements about events on the battlefield.

Ukrainian officials have said Russia might step up its offensive before May 9, when Moscow commemorates the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War.

UN: 500 people rescued from 'hellscapes'

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said Thursday that 500 people were successfully freed from the plant and area around it.

"We must continue to do all we can to get people out of these hellscapes," Guterres said.

In a video statement recorded Thursday from the underground bunkers, Capt. Sviatoslav Palamar, deputy commander of Ukraine's Azov Regiment, said the "wounded soldiers are dying in agony due to the lack of proper treatment."

The Azov Regiment is a far-right armed group that was folded into Ukraine's National Guard after Russia's first invasion in 2014.

The defenders will "stand till the end. They only hope for a miracle," Kateryna Prokopenko said after speaking by phone to her husband, a leader of the steel plant defenders. "They won't surrender."

She said her husband, Azov Regiment commander Denys Prokopenko, told her he would love her forever.

"I am going mad from this. It seemed like words of goodbye," she said.

Ukraine repels Russians in east

Meanwhile, 10 weeks into the devastating war, Ukraine's military claimed it recaptured some areas in the south and repelled other attacks in the east, further frustrating Russian President Vladimir Putin's ambitions after his abortive attempt to seize Kyiv. Ukrainian and Russian forces are fighting village by village.

U.S. Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said Russian forces are making only "plodding" progress in the Donbas.

The head of Britain's armed forces, Chief of the Defence Staff Admiral Tony Radakin, said Putin is "trying to rush to a tactical victory" before Victory Day. But he said Russian forces are struggling to gain momentum.

Fearful of new attacks surrounding Victory Day, the mayor of the western Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk urged residents to leave for the countryside over the long weekend and warned them not to gather in public places.

And the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia, a key transit point for evacuees from Mariupol, announced a curfew from Sunday evening through Tuesday morning.

Ukrainian doctors lack basic antibiotics, insulin

In a video address to a medical charity Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described the toll the invasion has taken on Ukraine's health-care system, saying hundreds of hospitals and other medical institutions have been devastated, while doctors have been left without drugs to treat cancer or the ability to perform surgery.

Many places, he said, lack even basic antibiotics in eastern and southern Ukraine, the main battlefields.

"If you consider just medical infrastructure, as of today Russian troops have destroyed or damaged nearly 400 health-care institutions: hospitals, maternity wards, outpatient clinics," Zelensky said.

In areas occupied by Russian forces the situation is catastrophic, he said.

"This amounts to a complete lack of medication for cancer patients. It means extreme difficulties or a complete lack of insulin for diabetes. It is impossible to carry out surgery. It even means, quite simply, a lack of antibiotics."

In one of the most widely denounced acts of the war, a maternity hospital was all but destroyed on March 9 in Mariupol. Russia alleged pictures of the attack were staged and said the site had been used by armed Ukrainian groups.

The Kremlin says it targets only military or strategic sites and does not target civilians.

Belarus calls for end to conflict

In other developments, Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus's authoritarian president, defended Russia's invasion of Ukraine in an interview with The Associated Press, but said he didn't expect the conflict to "drag on this way."

Lukashenko, whose country was used by the Russians as a launch pad for the invasion, said Moscow had to act because Kyiv was "provoking" Russia.

But in the interview, he created some distance between himself and the Kremlin, repeatedly calling for an end to the conflict and referring to it as a "war" — a term Moscow refuses to use. The Kremlin insists on calling it a "special military operation."

WATCH | Military losses mount in Ukraine as war rages on:

Trapped residents emerge from Azovstal steel mill in Mariupol, Ukraine

3 years ago

Duration 0:58

As many as 100 people, most of whom had been trapped underground at the Azovstal steel mill in Mariupol, Ukraine, have left via a safe corridor.