Russian forces push deeper into Mariupol, battle over steel plant

Russian forces push deeper into Ukraine’s besieged and battered port city of Mariupol, where heavy fighting shuts down a major steel plant and local authorities plead for more Western help.

The fall of Mariupol, the scene of some of the war’s worst suffering, would mark a major battlefield advance for the Russians, who are largely bogged down outside major cities more than three weeks into the biggest land invasion in Europe since World War II.

“Children, elderly people are dying. The city is destroyed and it is wiped off the face of the earth,” Mariupol police officer Michail Vershnin says from a rubble-strewn street in a video addressed to Western leaders.

Ukrainian and Russian forces battle over the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, says Vadym Denysenko, adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister. “One of the largest metallurgical plants in Europe is actually being destroyed,” Denysenko says in televised remarks.