Russian troops have begun to storm the Azovstal steelworks in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol even though hundreds of civilians are said to be holed up inside along with Ukrainian soldiers, as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced 300 million pounds ($376 million) worth of extra military aid for Ukraine in a video address to the parliament in Kyiv.
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Ukraine’s Center for Strategic Communications under the National Security and Defense Council said in a statement on May 3 that the “Russians are trying to break into the territory of Azovstal.”
The AP news agency quoted Ukrainian troops defending the steel plant as saying the operation by Russian forces to storm the the last pocket of resistance in the city was under way.
When asked to confirm the situation, Svyatoslav Palamar, the deputy commander of the Azov Battalion, which is holed up in the plant, told Ukrayinska Pravda that “it is true.”
The storming of the plant comes days after Russian President Vladimir Putin said he had called off plans for such an operation. Putin instead said he wanted Russian forces to blockade the sprawling plant “so a fly can’t get through.”
Earlier on May 3, Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko said more than 200 civilians were still inside the plant.
Britain has already sent military equipment, including missiles and missile launchers, to Ukraine. The new aid will consist of electronic warfare equipment, a battery radar system, GPS jamming equipment, and thousands of night vision devices.
In his speech, Johnson referred to a 1940 address by World War II leader Winston Churchill as Britain faced Nazi Germany’s aggression.
“The British people showed such unity and resolve that we remember our time of greatest peril as our finest hour,” Johnson told the Verkhovna Rada. “This is Ukraine’s finest hour, an epic chapter in your national story that will be remembered and recounted for generations to come.”
“We will carry on supplying Ukraine…with weapons, funding, and humanitarian aid, until we have achieved our long-term goal, which must be so to fortify Ukraine that no one will ever dare to attack you again,” Johnson said.
In Brussels, the European Commission is expected to finalize a proposed sixth package of EU sanctions against Russia, including a possible embargo on buying Russian oil, on May 3. In a major shift, Germany said it was prepared to back an immediate oil embargo.
But another EU member, Slovakia, said it was seeking an exemption from any EU ban on Russian gas and oil imports, with Economy Minister Richard Sulik saying that such an exception was “extremely important.”
Sulik, who is also the deputy prime minister, said his country cannot make do without Russian oil.
The sanctions will also target the country’s largest bank, Sberbank, which will be excluded from the global banking communications system SWIFT, unnamed diplomats said.
Mariupol Mayor Boychenko said a total of about 100,000 civilians were still in the southern Ukrainian city, which used to have a population of some 400,000 before the Russian invasion.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said on May 3 that several buses and ambulances carrying more than 100 civilians, some of whom were wounded, from the Azovstal steel plant in the besieged city of Mariupol had safely reached the city of Zaporizhzhya.
“It is an immense relief that some civilians who have suffered for weeks are now out,” ICRC President Peter Maurer said in a statement on May 3.
“The ICRC hasn’t forgotten the people who are still there, nor those in other areas affected by the hostilities or those in dire need of humanitarian relief, wherever they are. We will not spare any effort to reach them,” he added.
The statement did not say when the convoy left Mariupol.
An official from the United Nations, which participated in the operation, said that “101 women, men, children, and older persons could finally leave the bunkers below the Azovstal steelworks and see the daylight after two months.”
Fighting also raged in the strategic port city of Odesa and across Ukraine’s east. A 15-year-old boy was killed in a fresh Russian strike on Odesa, the city council said.
Ukraine’s second-biggest city, Kharkiv, was under shelling, the military said on May 3, while the General Staff said Ukrainian forces were defending the approach to Kharkiv from Izyum, some 120 kilometers to the southeast.
Since Russia launched its unprovoked war on February 24, its troops have failed to completely take over any major Ukrainian city.
On the diplomatic front, Germany’s conservative opposition leader traveled to Kyiv on May 3 for meetings with Ukrainian officials, but Chancellor Olaf Scholz made clear that he wouldn’t be visiting Ukraine any time soon.
Friedrich Merz, who heads former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Union bloc, visited the town of Irpin, on the outskirts of Kyiv, which has been heavily bombarded by Russian forces.
Scholz refused to go to Ukraine because of Kyiv’s refusal to invite Germany’s head of state, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, whom Ukrainians accuse of cozying up to Russia during his time as foreign minister.
“It can’t work that a country that provides so much military aid, so much financial aid…you then say that the president can’t come,” Scholz told public broadcaster ZDF late Monday.
The United States warned that Moscow was planning to formally take over regions in Ukraine’s east.
Michael Carpenter, the U.S. ambassador to the OSCE, said Russia is planning to imminently annex the territories of Luhansk and Donetsk in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, using referendums after failing to overthrow the government in Kyiv.
Russia encountered surprisingly staunch resistance in the north around the regions of Kyiv and Chernihiv, which forced it to redeploy its troops in the south and east, where fighting has intensified in recent days.
Ukraine’s east and south are seen as key strategic goals for Russia, allowing it a land link to Crimea.
WATCH: Ukrainian soldiers defending the village of New York, near Donetsk, say they repelled several attacks as Russian forces tried to outflank their positions. RFE/RL correspondent Maryan Kushnir spent time with them on April 29 as the sound of explosions and small-arms fire echoed across the landscape.
Moscow raised fears that those goals may stretch further, to Moldova’s breakaway region of Transdniester, which is backed by Russia and borders Ukraine to the southwest along the Dniester river. Moldova also borders NATO member Romania.
On May 2, authorities said a Russian rocket strike hit a main bridge across the Dniester estuary just west of the port city of Odesa.
A British intelligence estimate said on May 2 that Russia’s elite forces have suffered such large casualties that it will take years to replenish them. It said more than 25 percent of Russia’s invading force has been disabled since the start of the conflict.
Separately, Russia’s state news agency TASS quoted the Defense Ministry on May 3 as saying that more than 1 million people, including nearly 200,000 children, had been taken from Ukraine to Russia in the past two months.
Defense Ministry official Mikhail Mizintsev said those civilians “were evacuated to the territory of the Russian Federation from the dangerous regions” of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, and from other parts that came under Russian control.
No details were provided on the location or circumstances of the moves.
