President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Saturday praised military pilots who died trying, despite near impossible odds, to deliver aid to fighters who were besieged at a steel plant in Mariupol, a city that Russia’s claims has finally fallen to its forces after a siege that lasted for months.
“Many of our pilots died,” Mr. Zelensky said in an interview with a Ukrainian television channel to mark the third anniversary of his inauguration as president. He described the pilots as “absolutely heroic people” who knew it was “almost impossible” to bring medicine, food and water to the Azovstal steel plant, as well as to evacuate the wounded and bring out bodies of those killed, because they would have to run a gauntlet of Russia’s air defenses with no established air corridor.
Some weeks, the helicopter pilots who set out on their missions knew there was a 90 percent chance that they would not return, Mr. Zelensky said, adding that he had not been able to speak about the contribution of the pilots until now, presumably for security reasons.
The Ukrainian military said on Saturday that Russia is demining the port in an attempt to get it running again. Reopening the port would tighten Moscow’s control over the parts of southern and eastern Ukraine that it controls as well as increase its economic leverage over the Black Sea, where its Navy is dominant.
Hundreds of Ukrainian fighters have surrendered at the steel plant this week and are now in Russian hands, and Russia announced late Friday that the last of the defenders had laid down their arms. Mr. Zelensky did not comment in his television interview on whether Moscow now controls the city in its entirety.
Overall, Ukraine has “broken the backbone of the largest, or one of the strongest, armies in the world,” he said.
The war is now entering is fourth month and, while Moscow has been forced to retreat first from outside the capital city, Kyiv, and more recently from the country’s second largest city, Kharkiv, neither side is currently making more than incremental gains.
At the same time, negotiations aimed at reaching a cease-fire have stalled. Mr. Zelensky said that Russia had thwarted an initial attempt to end the war through dialogue and that now the conflict was “very difficult.” He said that the war would be bloody, but that victory would come and “the end will definitely be in diplomacy.”