From the Liveblog of
Thursday, May 5, 2022
Kremlin: No plans for V-Day celebrations in Mariupol but ‘a time will come’
Add ToI as a Preferred Source on GoogleMOSCOW — The Kremlin says there won’t Victory Day celebrations in Ukraine’s Mariupol, a strategic port city that Russian troops claimed control of last month.
Victory Day — celebrated annually on May 9 — is a symbolic holiday in Russia marking the Soviet victory in World War II, accompanied by a grand military parade in Moscow and smaller events across Russian cities.
“A time will come and there will be a big celebration there,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov tells reporters, adding that there were no plans for official visits on the day.
“There will certainly be Russians there, and there will be many Russians on May 9, but I don’t know about any official delegation,” Peksov says.
Russian troops besieged Mariupol for several weeks and hundreds are believed to have died in the southeastern Ukrainian city that was left without access to food, water or electricity.
Some Ukrainian soldiers and civilians remain holed up in the city’s huge Azovstal steel plant, sheltering in a Soviet-era network of underground tunnels.
The Russian army had announced a three-day ceasefire at the steelworks starting yesterday to allow civilians to leave but a Ukrainian commander said Moscow’s forces had violated that promise.
The Times of Israel Community.