Biden added it would “contain many of the highly effective weapons systems we have already provided and new capabilities tailored to the wider assault we expect Russia to launch in eastern Ukraine”.
He said this would include artillery, armoured personnel carriers and helicopters. US president Joe Biden announced $800m in new US military aid to Ukraine on Wednesday. Its capture would be the first fall of a major Ukrainian city and would help Russia secure a land passage between the self-proclaimed republics in Donetsk and Luhansk in Donbas and Crimea, which Moscow occupied and annexed in 2014. The city’s mayor has said 21,000 civilians have died and more than 100,000 remain there awaiting evacuation. The city, the main target yet to be brought under Russian control in the eastern Donbas region, has been encircled and largely reduced to rubble during Moscow’s seven-week invasion. The 26th Marine Brigade had said on Monday that it was preparing for a final battle in Mariupol. The Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, who says his forces are playing a major role in the battle, urged the last Ukrainians holed up in Azovstal to surrender. Ukraine’s defence ministry said it had no information about the surrender and the Ukrainian military command said only that Russian forces were attacking the Azovstal industrial area and the port. There was no independent confirmation of the claims. It later said Mariupol’s “trade seaport” was under full control of Russian forces.
In one of the most critical battles of the war, Russia’s defence ministry said that on Wednesday 1,026 soldiers from Ukraine’s 36th Marine Brigade, including 162 officers, had “voluntarily laid down their arms” near the city’s Ilyich iron and steelworks. More than 1,000 Ukrainian marines defending the besieged city of Mariupol have surrendered and the port has been captured, Moscow has said, as the presidents of four countries bordering Russia arrived in Kyiv in a show of support for Ukraine. New columns of equipment are being brought in,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in his nightly address. “Rocket bombings and artillery strikes continue. Satellite image shows the Russian cruiser Moskva in the Crimean port of Sevastopol on 7 April 2022.
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