The fall of Mariupol appears at hand as Ukraine is moving to abandon a sprawling steel plant where its soldiers had held out under relentless bombardment for months, which would make it the biggest city to fall into Russian hands. Much of it, though, has been reduced to rubble. Ukraine estimates some 20,000 civilians have been killed in the Russian assault on Mariupol, a city on the Azov Sea that stands between the Russian mainland and the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014. Hundreds of Ukrainian fighters have left the Azovstal steel plant and turned themselves over to Russian hands.
The Russian bombardment killed over 20,000 civilians, according to the Ukrainian side, and left the remaining inhabitants — perhaps one-quarter of the southern port city's prewar population of 430,000 — with little food, water, heat or medicine.
Over the past few days, Sweden and Finland announced plans to apply for NATO membership, and Ukraine reported that Moscow’s forces had retreated from around the northeastern city of Kharkiv in the face of counterattacks and had taken heavy losses in an Ukrainian assault on a pontoon bridge in the Donbas.
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak likened the Ukrainian defenders to the vastly outnumbered Spartans who held out against Persian forces in ancient Greece. “83 days of Mariupol defense will go down in history as the Thermopylae of the XXI century," he tweeted. A negotiated withdrawal could save lives on the Russian side, too, sparing its troops from what almost certainly would be a bloody battle to finish off the defenders inside the plant, which sprawls over 11 square kilometers .
“Both sides will be able take pride or boast about a victory — victories of different kinds,” he said.
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