SVIATOHIRSK, Ukraine — Russia claimed victory over the battered southern Ukrainian port of Mariupol on Thursday, with President Vladimir Putin saying he had ordered his forces not to attack the city’s last holdouts sheltering in a vast steelworks but to blockade the compound so tightly that “not even a fly comes through.”
Ukraine’s government rejected the Russian assertion of a complete takeover of the once-thriving coastal city, which has been nearly wiped out in the course of nonstop attack. But Putin’s announcement that troops would not storm the sprawling Azovstal steel plant — where Ukrainian forces and civilians are holed up — was at once a sign of Russian confidence in its grip on Mariupol and of the fierce resistance of local defenders who have refused the enemy’s demands to surrender.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told a French television station Thursday that “local residents, children, the elderly and the military are blocked in the city of Mariupol.”
