Ukrainian forces were poised to defend their final bastion in the devastated port city of Mariupol yesterday, desperate to deny Russia a symbolic win on the eve of Moscow’s Victory Day celebrations.
Shelling and missile strikes have intensified in the build up to the World War II anniversary, and rescuers are hunting for 60 Ukrainian civilians feared killed in the bombing of a village school.
Africa Daily News, New York reports that President Volodymyr Zelensky marked the anniversary on the end of the World War by comparing Ukraine’s battle for national survival to the region’s war of resistance against its former Nazi occupiers.
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“Decades after World War II, darkness has returned to Ukraine, and it has become black and white again,” Zelensky said, in a monochrome social media video shot against the backdrop of bombed out apartment block.
“Evil has returned, in a different uniform, under different slogans, but for the same purpose,” he warned, trying to turn Russia leader President Vladimir Putin’s “anti-Nazi” rhetoric back on itself.
Russia, meanwhile, was gearing up for a Victory Day parade designed to associate the invasion of its neighbour with the national pride felt over the Soviet Union’s defeat of Germany.
Zelensky was also to meet G7 leaders via video conference to discuss the crisis, and European diplomats were hammering out the details of their latest sanctions package against Moscow.
On the ground, the key battles were being fought in Ukraine’s east.
Civilians have now been evacuated from Mariupol’s Azovstal steelworks, leaving a small force of defenders holed up in its sprawling network of underground tunnels and bunkers.
The complex the final pocket of Ukrainian resistance in the port city has taken on a symbolic value.
