RUBIZHNE, Ukraine — Russia tightened its grip Wednesday around Ukraine’s last stronghold in the besieged port of Mariupol, whose desperate defenders, holed up in underground shelters beneath a massive steel plant, pleaded for international help, declaring 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 and Western powers racing to supply Ukraine with heavier weapons, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a video address to the nation that nearly all of 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.”
