More than 1,000 Ukrainian marines defending the besieged city of Mariupol have surrendered and the port has been captured, Moscow has said, as the presidents of four countries bordering Russia arrived in Kyiv in a show of support for Ukraine.
In one of the most critical battles of the war, Russia’s defence ministry said that on Wednesday 1,026 soldiers from Ukraine’s 36th Marine Brigade, including 162 officers, had “voluntarily laid down their arms” near the city’s Ilyich iron and steelworks.
It later said Mariupol’s “trade sea port” was under full control of Russian forces.
There was no independent confirmation of the claims. Ukraine’s defence ministry said it had no information about the surrender and the Ukrainian military command said only that Russian forces were attacking the Azovstal industrial area and the port.
The Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, who says his forces are playing a major role in the battle, urged the last Ukrainians holed up in Azovstal to surrender. The 26th Marine Brigade had said on Monday that it was preparing for a final battle in Mariupol.
The city, the main target yet to be brought under Russian control in the eastern Donbas region, has been encircled and largely reduced to rubble during Moscow’s seven-week invasion. The city’s mayor has said 21,000 civilians have died and more than 100,000 remain there awaiting evacuation.
Its capture would be the first fall of a major Ukrainian city and would help Russia secure a land passage between the self-proclaimed republics in Donetsk and Luhansk in Donbas and Crimea, which Moscow occupied and annexed in 2014.
Joe Biden announced $800m in new US military aid to Ukraine on Wednesday. He said this would include artillery, armoured personnel carriers and helicopters. Biden added it would “contain many of the highly effective weapons systems we have already provided and new capabilities tailored to the wider assault we expect Russia to launch in eastern Ukraine”.
The Polish and Baltic presidents headed to the Ukrainian capital by train on Wednesday to show support for the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and his embattled troops in what the Polish presidential adviser Jakub Kumoch called “this decisive moment for the country”.
The Polish president, Andrzej Duda, Estonia’s Alar Karis, Gitanas Nausėda of Lithuania and Latvia’s Egils Levits met in the Polish city of Rzeszów near the Ukrainian border. “Heading to Kyiv with a strong message of political support and military assistance,” Nausėda tweeted from the station.
The programme of the visit by the leaders of four Nato member states – who fear they may face Russian attacks if Ukraine falls – was not disclosed for security reasons but local media reported that the heads of state visited Borodianka, near Kyiv.
Nausėda said the town was “permeated with pain and suffering” after “civilian Ukrainians were murdered and tortured there, and residential homes and other civilian infrastructure were bombed”.
He said it was “hard to believe that such war atrocities could be perpetrated in 21st-century Europe, but that is the reality. This is a war we must win.”
It came as Ukrainian forces claimed to have damaged a Russian warship carrying 510 crew in the Black Sea with missile strikes on Wednesday. “Neptune missiles guarding the Black Sea caused very serious damage to the Russian ship,” Maksym Marchenko, the governor of Odessa, wrote on Telegram.
The visit followed Kyiv’s reported refusal to meet the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who visited Poland on Tuesday and said he had planned to go on to Ukraine but “was not wanted”. The former foreign minister is facing heavy criticism for his past policy of rapprochement towards Moscow.
On Wednesday, the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said it was “confusing” that Steinmeier had not been received in Kyiv. Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany said the government would be glad to welcome Scholz, but diplomats said the snub to Steinmeier may make that more difficult.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, declined on Wednesday to repeat Biden’s accusation that Russia was carrying out “genocide” against Ukrainians, warning that verbal escalations would not help end the war.
The US president said on Tuesday it had “become clearer and clearer that Putin is just trying to wipe out the idea of even being able to be a Ukrainian”. Macron said it was important for leaders to be careful with language.
“I would say that Russia unilaterally unleashed the most brutal war, that it is now established that war crimes were committed by the Russian army and that it is now necessary to find those responsible and make them face justice,” he said.
After visiting Bucha – the site of mass killings of Ukrainian civilians – Duda told a news conference: “This is not war, this is terrorism.” The Polish leader said that the perpetrators and those who had given orders had to be brought to justice.
Zelenskiy told Estonian MPs on Wednesday, without providing evidence, that Russia was using phosphorus bombs in Ukraine. Ukrainian forces in Mariupol said a drone had dropped a poisonous substance on the city, but there has been no independent confirmation that Russia used banned chemical weapons.
While Russian troops have largely withdrawn from around Ukraine’s capital in the face of stiff resistance and logistical problems, western officials and analysts say the invasion force is gearing up for a major offensive in the east.
Military experts say local support, logistics, the terrain in the region and the appointment by Moscow of a new senior general, Aleksandr Dvornikov, could improve the performance of a force that Britain’s defence ministry said on Wednesday had so far been “hampered by an inability to cohere and coordinate”.
Ukraine’s armed forces command said Russian forces were fully ready for a fresh assault in the eastern Donetsk and southern Kherson regions. “In the Donetsk and Tavria [Kherson] directions, according to available information, the enemy is ready for offensive actions,” the armed forces said in a Facebook post.
The Russian retreat from around Kyiv has led to the discovery of large numbers of apparently massacred civilians, drawing international condemnation and calls for a war crimes investigation. The Kyiv district police chief said on Wednesday that 720 bodies had been found around the capital, and more than 200 people were missing.
An expert report commissioned by the Vienna-based OSCE security and human rights organisation published on Wednesday found “clear patterns of (international humanitarian law) violations by the Russian forces in their conduct of hostilities”.
It said there had also been also violations by Ukraine, but concluded those committed by Russia were “by far larger in scale and nature”. Ukraine has previously acknowledged there could be “isolated incidents” of violations and said it would investigate.
Moscow, however, has rejected all allegations of atrocities and Vladimir Putin dismissed the reports as “fakes”. The Russian president said on Tuesday that Moscow would “rhythmically and calmly” continue its operation, which the UN says has so far driven more than 10 million Ukrainians from their homes, more than 4.6 million of whom have fled abroad.