Ukrainians grow desperate for rescue in Mariupol as Russian advance held off

Ukrainian forces fought Saturday to hold off a Russian advance aimed at capturing an eastern industrial region along with Ukraine's last holdout in the southern city of Mariupol, where fighters and civilians hiding under a heavily damaged steel mill endure agonizing conditions.

The United Nations continued trying to broker an evacuation of civilians from the sprawling Soviet-era plant and other bombed-out ruins of Mariupol, a port city that Russia has sought to capture and subjected to heavy bombardment since it invaded Ukraine more than nine weeks ago.

There are up to 1,000 civilians at the city's Azovstal steelworks, according to Ukrainian officials, who have not said how many fighters remained in the only part of Mariupol not occupied by Russian forces. The Russians put the number of Ukrainian soldiers at the plant at about 2,000.

Video and images shared with The Associated Press by two Ukrainian women who said their husbands are among the fighters there showed unidentified wounded men with stained bandages in need of changing; others had open wounds or amputated limbs.

A skeleton medical staff was treating at least 600 wounded people, said the women, who identified their husbands as members of the Azov Regiment of Ukraine's National Guard. The regiment is a far-right armed group that was folded into the country's national guard after Russia's first invasion in 2014.

In the video the women shared, the wounded men tell the camera they eat once a day and share as little as 1.5 litres of water a day among four. Supplies inside the surrounded facility are depleted, they said.

The AP could not independently verify the date and location of the footage, which the women said was taken in the last week in the warren of passageways beneath the steel mill.

One shirtless man spoke in obvious pain as he described his wounds: two broken ribs, a punctured lung and a dislocated arm that "was hanging on the flesh."

"I want to tell everyone who sees this: If you will not stop this here, in Ukraine, it will go further, to Europe," he said.

The Soviet-era steel plant has a vast underground network of bunkers able to withstand airstrikes. But the situation has grown more dire after the Russians dropped "bunker busters" and other bombs.

Above ground, Mariupol's residents picked through their ruined houses looking for their belongings and continued to cook in the streets on Friday. Furniture was piled outside burned-out apartment buildings as people ventured out in the spring sunshine, and explosions could be heard in the background.

Kindergarten teacher Natalia Kalugina, 64, cooked curd pancakes in the street. She said she had found the shelling scary.

"I still cannot laugh. It's only tears. My brother's house was destroyed by shelling," she said.

In the bombed-out city, about 100,000 people were believed trapped with little food, water or medicine.