Business Insider
Russian commanders angry at how long it’s taking to capture Mariupol, where Ukraine says it will fight to the end: UK intel
Kieran Corcoran – April 18, 2022
- Mariupol, a port city in southern Ukraine, has seen the fiercest fighting of the Russian invasion.
- Troops there have been surrounded and outnumbered, fighting in hellish conditions.
- On Monday, UK officials said Russian leaders would be upset that the city was still unconquered.
Russian commanders will be unhappy with their troops’ inability to conquer the besieged city of Mariupol in Ukraine, British intelligence said Monday morning.
—Ministry of Defence 🇬🇧 (@DefenceHQ) April 18, 2022
In a daily update on the fighting in Ukraine, officials wrote: “Russian commanders will be concerned by the time it is taking to subdue Mariupol. Concerted Ukrainian resistance has severely tested Russian forces and diverted men and materiel, slowing Russia’s advance elsewhere.” (Materiel is a catch-all term for military supplies.)
Mariupol, a port city on Ukraine’s southern coast, has been the scene of intense fighting for almost the entire duration of the 54-day invasion.
It has been surrounded for weeks, hit continuously by shelling and slowly advancing ground troops. Survivors who made it out of the city have repeatedly described it as a “hell on earth,” deprived of food, water, and heating.
Its mayor said 21,000 people there had been killed and that their bodies were “carpeted through the streets.”
—Daria Kaleniuk (@dkaleniuk) April 2, 2022
Ukrainian fighters in the city have held out for weeks.
Reports from the Associated Press and Financial Times described a last stand by soldiers from Ukraine’s marine corps and its right-wing Azov Battalion paramilitary.
It said they were resisting from inside a bomb-outed Soviet steelworks and a series of tunnels. Some fighters there surrendered in recent days. These included Aiden Aslin, a British man serving as a marine, who featured in a Russian propaganda broadcast and appeared to speak under duress.
Ukraine’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, told ABC’s “This Week” that the troops in Mariupol “will fight until the end.”
Russian leaders have given no public statements of frustration with their progress in Mariupol.
But analysts and intelligence officials have said Russia’s President Vladimir Putin would have been enraged by a war effort that fell short of his apparent expectations of a swift victory.
After an unsuccessful advance on northern Ukraine and its capital of Kyiv, Russia announced a pivot in its strategy to focus its forces on the eastern Donbas region, which includes Mariupol.