Ukraine needs more heavy weapons from the West immediately to have any

chance of saving the port city on the Sea of Azov.

The battered port city of Mariupol appeared on the brink of falling to Russian forces on
Sunday after seven weeks under siege, a development that what would give Moscow a crucial
success in Ukraine following a botched attempt to storm the capital and the loss of the Russian
navy's Black Sea flagship.

The Russian military estimated that about 2,500 Ukrainian fighters holding out at a hulking
steel plant with a warren of underground passageways provided the last pocket of resistance in
Mariupol. Russia gave another deadline for their surrender, saying those who put down their
weapons were “guaranteed to keep their lives,” but Ukraine remained defiant.

"All those who will continue resistance will be destroyed,” Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, the
Russian Defense Ministry's spokesman, said. He said intercepted communications indicated
there were about 400 foreign mercenaries along with the Ukrainian troops at the Azovstal steel
mill, a claim that couldn’t be independently verified.

Seizing Mariupol would free up Russian forces to weaken and encircle Ukrainian soldiers
forces in eastern Ukraine, where Russia has focused its war aims for now and is deploying
personnel and equipment withdrawn from the north after the failure to take Kyiv.

Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar described Mariupol as a “shield defending
Ukraine” as Russian troops prepare for a full-scale offensive in Donbas, the country’s eastern
industrial heartland where Moscow-backed separatists already control some territory.
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In a reminder that no part of Ukraine was immune until the war ends, Russian forces carried out
new missile strikes Sunday near Kyiv and elsewhere in an apparent effort to weaken Ukraine’s
military capacity before the anticipated assault in the east.

After the humiliating loss of the flagship of its Black Sea Fleet, Russia’s military command
vowed Friday to step up missile strikes on the capital. The Russian military said Sunday that it
had attacked an ammunition plant near Kyiv overnight with precision-guided missiles, the third
such strike in as many days.
 Russia’s stepped-up attacks on Kyiv came after it accused Ukraine on Thursday of wounding
seven people and damaging about 100 residential buildings with airstrikes in Bryansk, a region
bordering Ukraine. Ukrainian officials have not confirmed hitting targets in Russia.

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said a Saturday strike on what Russia's Defense Ministry
identified as an armored vehicle plant killed one person and wounded several. He advised
residents who fled the city earlier in the war not to return.
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The Russian military also claimed Sunday to have destroyed Ukrainian air defense radars in the
east, near Sievierodonetsk, as well as several ammunition depots elsewhere. Explosions were
reported overnight in Kramatorsk, an eastern city where rockets killed at least 57 people at a
train station crowded with civilians trying to evacuate before the expected Russian offensive.

The ongoing siege and relentless bombardment of Mariupol has come at a terrible cost, with
officials estimating Russians had killed at least 21,000 people. Just 120,000 people remain in
the city, out of a prewar population of 450,000.

Ms. Malyar, the deputy defense minister, said the Russians have continued to hit Mariupol with
airstrikes and could be getting ready for an amphibious landing to beef up their ground forces.

Capturing the city with a land area about half the size of Hong Kong’s and home to a Sea of
Azov port would also allow Russia to secure a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula, which it
annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

So far, tunnels at the sprawling Azovstal steel mill, which covers an area of more than 11
square kilometers (over 4.2 square miles), have allowed the defenders to hide and resist until
they run out of ammunition.

With Russia apparently poised to declare victory, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy
said the city’s fall could scuttle any attempt at a negotiated peace.

“The destruction of all our guys in Mariupol — what they are doing now — can put an end to
any format of negotiations,” Zelenskyy said in an interview with Ukrainian journalists.

In his nightly address to the nation, Mr. Zelenskyy called on the West to send more heavy
weapons immediately if there is any chance of saving the city, adding Russia “is deliberately
trying to destroy everyone who is there.”

Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer, who met with Vladimir Putin this past week in Moscow
— the first European leader to do so since the invasion began Feb. 24 — said the Russian
president is “in his own war logic” on Ukraine.

In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Nehammer said he thinks Putin believes he is
winning the war and “we have to look in his eyes and we have to confront him with that, what
we see in Ukraine.’’

Nehammer said he told Putin what he saw during a visit to the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, where
more than 350 bodies have been found along with evidence of killings and torture under
Russian occupation, and “it was not a friendly conversation.”

Like Mariupol, the northeast city of Kharkiv has been an ongoing target of Russian aggression.
Mayor Ihor Terekhov said three people were killed and 34 wounded Saturday.
 One explosion believed to have been caused by a missile sent rescue workers scrambling near
an outdoor market. The workers said one person was killed and at least 18 wounded. Local
officials said 10 people died in rocket attacks on residential areas of Kharkiv on Friday.

Nate Mook, a member of the World Central Kitchen NGO run by celebrity chef José Andrés,
said in a tweet that four workers in Kharkiv were wounded by a strike. Andrés tweeted that
staff members were unnerved but safe.

Zelenskyy estimated that 2,500 to 3,000 Ukrainian troops have died in the war, and about
10,000 have been wounded. The office of Ukraine’s prosecutor general said Saturday that at
least 200 children have been killed, and more than 360 wounded.

Despite the war still raging, Zelenskyy spoke in his nightly address about Ukraine's plans for a
memorial to honor the dead and the sacrifices of the Ukrainian people.

One proposal is to tell the story of the destroyed bridge near the capital that people used to
escape, “to remind all generations of our people of the brutal and senseless invasion Ukraine
has been able to fend off,'' he said.

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