After two months of siege, Putin declares victory in Mariupol
Russian President Vladimir Putin declared victory in the biggest battle of the Ukraine war on Thursday and "liberated" the port of Mariupol after nearly two months of a siege, although hundreds of the city's defenders are still holed up inside a large steel factory.
Ukraine said Putin's attempt to avoid a final confrontation with its forces in the city was an admission that he did not have enough forces to defeat it.
"I have successfully completed the combat efforts to liberate Mariupol. Let me congratulate you on this occasion and please convey my congratulations to the troops," Putin told Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu at a televised Kremlin meeting.
"I think that the proposed intrusion into the industrial zone is unnecessary. I order you to cancel it ... There is no need to go into those vaults and crawl underground through those industrial facilities ... Tightly encircle that industrial zone so that not even a fly can pass," Putin added.
The decision not to storm the Azovstal steel plant, days after the defenders holed up in it to surrender or face death, allowed Putin to claim his first major prize of the war after his forces were forced out of northern Ukraine last month.
But it does not amount to the outright victory that Moscow wanted and sought after nearly two months of fierce fighting that reduced the city to rubble.
"They can't actually control Azovstal, they realize it, they suffered heavy losses there," Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Aristovich said in a statement.
Asked for comment on Putin's announcement, a Ukrainian Defense Ministry spokesman said it showed he had "a tendency to schizophrenia".
Mariupol, once home to 400,000 people, has witnessed not only the fiercest battles of the war, but also its worst humanitarian disaster, as hundreds of thousands of civilians have been living in isolation for nearly two months under Russian siege and bombardment.
Journalists who arrived in the city during the siege found streets littered with corpses, nearly all buildings destroyed, and residents languishing in basements in freezing temperatures, venturing outside only to cook leftovers on makeshift stoves or bury corpses in gardens.
Two incidents in particular became emblematic of what Kyiv and the West call Russian war crimes - the bombing of a maternity hospital and, a week later, the bombing of a theater where hundreds of civilians were sheltering in its basement.
Moscow denies targeting civilians and says, without evidence, that the incidents are fake.
Ukraine estimates that tens of thousands of civilians died in Mariupol.
It says some were buried in mass graves, while others were removed from the streets by Russian forces using mobile cremation trucks.
The United Nations and the Red Cross say the number of civilian deaths is still unknown, but at least in the thousands.
Shoigu told Putin that Russia had killed more than 4,000 Ukrainian soldiers in its campaign to seize Mariupol, and that 1,478 had surrendered.
These numbers cannot be verified.
And two of the British surrendered.
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