Russians push deeper into Mariupol as locals plead for help

“Children, elderly people are dying. The city is destroyed and it is wiped off the face of the earth,” Mariupol police officer Michail Vershnin said

A refugee child looks out from a bus after fleeing the war from neighbouring Ukraine, at the border crossing in Palanca, Moldova, Saturday, March 19, 2022. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits)

Russian forces pushed deeper into Ukraine’s besieged and battered port city of Mariupol on Saturday, where heavy fighting shut down a major steel plant and local authorities pleaded for more Western help.

The fall of Mariupol, the scene of some of the war’s worst suffering, would mark a major battlefield advance for the Russians, who are largely bogged down outside major cities more than three weeks into the biggest land invasion in Europe since World War II.