“The elimination of our troops, our men, will put an end to any negotiations,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview with the Ukrainska Pravda news website on Saturday. “This will be a dead end as we are not negotiating either our territories or our peoples.” Russian troops hope to make up for their failure to occupy Kyiv by seizing their first major war prize. The strategic port of Mariupol has been hit hardest by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24. The seizure of the port will allow Russia to connect by land the Crimean peninsula, which it annexed in 2014, and the Moscow-backed separatist states in eastern Ukraine. The port was besieged by Russian troops shortly after the invasion, but the unarmed and unarmed Ukrainian army held on. The civilians of Mariupol have borne the brunt of the battle, hiding in basements without aids for weeks. Russian troops have gradually advanced into the city, but groups of Ukrainian forces continue to keep out of the city’s giant metallurgical and heavy machinery factories, both of which have a vast network of underground tunnels. Reuters reporters in Russian-controlled areas of the city arrived at the Ilyich steel plant on Saturday, which Moscow claimed it had seized on Friday.
