RUBIZHNE, Ukraine — Russia delivered what it said was a last-chance surrender ultimatum Wednesday to Ukrainian forces in the besieged port of Mariupol, whose desperate defenders, pleading for international help, declared that they were “probably facing our last days, if not hours.”
Along hundreds of miles of a scythe-shaped battlefront in Ukraine’s east, the din of Russian bombardment echoed in cities and towns, while Moscow’s ground forces made a series of what Ukrainian military officials described as probing attacks that did not yield any substantial new territorial gains.
With the war about to grind into a ninth week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address to the nation that nearly all Russia’s combat-ready forces were “concentrated on the territory of our state” and just outside its borders. Moscow, he said, was deploying “almost everyone and everything that is capable of fighting.”
