By Joris Fioriti and Joshua Melvin

ZAPORIZHZHIA / KYIV  – Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday (21) claimed the “liberation” of the flattened city of Mariupol after nearly two months of fighting, demanding its trapped Ukrainian defenders be sealed into their underground last stand.

The fate of the besieged port has become totemic as Russia battles to complete a land bridge covering territories of Ukraine already under its control, including Crimea – which would deprive the country of its industrial heartland and most of its coastline.

President Joe Biden, however, said Putin was doomed to failure in Ukraine, as he announced $800 million (740 million euros) in extra US military aid including howitzers and tactical drones.

“Our unity at home with our allies and partners, and our unity with the Ukrainian people, is sending an unmistakable message to Putin – he will never succeed in dominating and occupying all of Ukraine,” he said.

Ukraine appealed for an immediate humanitarian corridor to allow civilians and wounded fighters to be evacuated from Mariupol’s sprawling Azovstal steel plant.

“They have almost no food, water, essential medicine,” Ukraine’s foreign ministry said.

Three school buses filled with Mariupol evacuees including women and children arrived in the city of Zaporizhzhia after crossing through territory held by Russian forces.

Exhausted evacuee Valentina, 73, told AFP she urgently needed medication for her back as she clutched onto an electricity pole with dirt-covered hands to stop herself from falling over.

“My apartment has been destroyed just like the house of my son,” she said, still wearing her slippers along with a torn black coat.

“From day one we were in a basement. It was cold. We were praying to God. I was asking him to protect us.”

The flow of Western military aid has helped force Russia to deflect its offensive to eastern Ukraine and accentuated the devastating pressure on places like Mariupol on the shores of the Sea of Azov.

“Mariupol has been liberated,” Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu told Putin during a televised meeting. “The remaining nationalist formations took refuge in the industrial zone of the Azovstal plant.”

Shoigu said around 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers remained inside the site, where the last pocket of resistance has been sheltering in a network of tunnels.

Up to 2,000 civilians are also enduring terrible conditions as they seek refuge inside the plant, according to Ukrainian authorities.

Putin said the “liberation” of Mariupol was a “success” for Russian forces but ordered Shoigu to call off the planned storming of the plant, dismissing it as “impractical”.

“There is no need to climb into these catacombs and crawl underground through these industrial facilities. Block off this industrial area so that not even a fly can escape,” Putin said.

Olexiy Arestovych, an advisor to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said that Russia had in fact admitted defeat in Mariupol and diverted forces further north.

Its aim was to reinforce the fight for all of Lugansk and Donetsk, two regions of Ukraine controlled by pro-Moscow separatists.

“They won’t succeed,” Arestovych warned.

The West staged another show of support for Zelenskyy with a visit to Kyiv by the Spanish and Danish prime ministers, who both pledged more military assistance.

Germany, under fire for not giving more to Zelenskyy’s government, said it had agreed with eastern European partners to indirectly supply Ukraine with heavy weapons.

“It’s about tanks, armoured vehicles, or other options individual countries are able to give,” Defence Minister Christine Lambrecht said, explaining that Germany would then replenish those countries’ stocks.

The deliveries would happen “in the next few days”, she said, because “military experts agree that the next two weeks will be decisive in Ukraine’s fight against Russia”.

Zelenskyy on Thursday compared Ukraine’s struggle to Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution, which overthrew the country’s decades-old authoritarian regime, as he urged Lisbon to provide heavy arms.

“We are not only fighting for our independence, but for our survival,” he told Portugal’s Parliament by video link.

In all, according to new UN figures, at least 2,345 Ukrainian civilians have been killed since Russia invaded on February 24.

In morgues around the capital, the bodies of some 1,020 civilians are being stored after Russian troops withdrew from the region, Deputy Prime Minister Olga Stefanishyna told AFP.

The bodies of nine civilians, some showing signs of torture, were found in the town of Borodyanka outside Kyiv, Ukrainian police said.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, visiting Borodyanka, said he was “shocked to witness the horror and atrocities of Putin’s war”.

In Bucha near Kyiv, some 400 bodies have been discovered since the Russians withdrew on March 31, local police chief Vitaly Lobas told AFP. Around a quarter of them are still unidentified.

British architect Norman Foster has offered to help rebuild the second city of Kharkiv, badly damaged by bombing, according to his foundation.

Retaliating against US sanctions, Russia imposed a travel ban on Vice President Kamala Harris, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg and 27 other prominent Americans “in perpetuity”.

It also indefinitely banned 61 Canadians whom it deemed were “directly involved in the development, substantiation and implementation of the Russophobic course of the ruling regime in Canada”.

But Russia’s international isolation deepened in turn.

A June meeting of the UN cultural agency’s World Heritage Committee scheduled to take place in the Russian city of Kazan was postponed indefinitely, a senior UNESCO source told AFP.

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Thursday that if the West “could figure out a way” for Europe to ban Russian hydrocarbon imports “without harming the entire globe through higher energy prices, that would be ideal”.

More than 7.7 million people are estimated to be internally displaced inside Ukraine, and more than five million have fled to other countries, the United Nations said, in Europe’s worst refugee crisis since World War II.

But returns have also accelerated in recent weeks, reaching over one million, according to a spokesman for Kyiv’s border force.

Those returning must often take huge risks. Olena Klymenko said Ukrainian soldiers had been de-mining her pummelled village of Moshchun.

“We found a booby trap in our garden. It seems it was disarmed. We don’t know,” said Klymenko, whose home was destroyed. “Still, we need to look for our stuff.”

– Agence France-Presse