KYIV, Ukraine — Russian forces in Ukraine tried to storm a steel plant housing soldiers and civilians in the southern city of Mariupol on Saturday in an attempt to crush the last pocket of resistance in a place of deep symbolic and strategic value to Moscow, Ukrainian officials said.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, meanwhile, announced he would meet Sunday in Kyiv with the U.S. secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and with the U.S. secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin. The White House declined comment.
Speaking in a news conference, Zelenskyy gave little detail about logistics of the encounter but said he expected concrete results — "not just presents or some kind of cakes, we are expecting specific things and specific weapons."
The reported assault on the steel plant on the eve of Orthodox Easter came after the Kremlin claimed its military had seized all of the shattered city except for the Azovstal plant, and as Russian forces pounded other cities and towns in southern and eastern Ukraine.
Elsewhere in the country, a 3-month-old baby was among six people killed when Russia fired cruise missiles at the Black Sea port city of Odesa, officials said.
"The war started when this baby was one month old. Can you imagine what is happening?" Zelenskyy said. "They are just bastards. ... I don't have any other words for it, just bastards."
The fate of the Ukrainians in the sprawling and beseiged seaside steel mill in Mariupol wasn't immediately clear; earlier Saturday, a Ukrainian military unit released a video reportedly taken two days earlier in which women and children holed up underground, some for as long as two months, said they longed to see the sun.
We want to see peaceful skies, we want to breathe in fresh air," one woman in the video said. "You have simply no idea what it means for us to simply eat, drink some sweetened tea. For us, it is already happiness."
Russia said it took control of several villages elsewhere in the eastern Donbas region and destroyed 11 Ukrainian military targets overnight, including three artillery warehouses. Russian attacks also struck populated areas.
Associated Press journalists observed shelling in residential areas of Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city; regional Gov. Oleh Sinehubov said three people were killed. In the Luhansk area of the Donbas, Gov. Serhiy Haidai said six people died during the shelling of a village, Gorskoi.
In Sloviansk, a town in northern Donbas, AP witnessed two soldiers arriving at a hospital, one of them mortally wounded. Nearby, a small group of people gathered outside a church where a priest blessed them with holy water on Holy Saturday.
While British officials said Russian forces had not gained significant new ground, Ukrainian officials announced a nationwide curfew ahead of Easter Sunday, a sign of the war's disruption and threat to the entire country.