Russian forces on Friday appeared close to capturing the strategic Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, military analysts said, an achievement that would culminate one of the bloodiest battles of the six-week war.

Despite being vastly outnumbered, Ukrainian forces in the city have withstood weeks of Russian bombardments from the land, air and sea, and continued to stage counterattacks.

But now, the last of the Ukrainian forces have been largely isolated in two main locations: in the city’s port and at a nearby steel factory.

Petro Andryushenko, an adviser to Mariupol’s mayor, denied Russian reports of a mass Ukrainian surrender in the city but acknowledged that the Russians had taken some of the remaining forces prisoner.

He said that Russian troops were strictly controlling entry and exit in Mariupol and were “filtering” Ukrainian civilians — a term that military analysts say is used by Russian forces elsewhere in Ukraine to describe searches, interrogations and possible targeted killings of Ukrainian civilians.

The mayor, Vadym Boichenko, said this week that 20,000 civilians had been killed in the city over the course of the war, a number that could not be independently verified.

The Mariupol City Council released a statement on Friday alluding to reports from residents that Russian troops had begun exhuming bodies buried in the yards of residential buildings. The Ukrainians are accusing Russia of taking such steps as part of a broader effort to hide evidence of war crimes.

“The occupiers forbid the burial of people killed by them,” the council said in its statement. Boichenko estimated that 120,000 people remained in the city, struggling to survive amid power outages and limited access to food.

Russia’s defence ministry said it had struck a missile factory on the outskirts of Kyiv and threatened to increase the “number and scale of missile strikes against facilities” in Ukraine’s capital in response to any “terrorist attacks and acts of sabotage” on Russian territory. Moscow has accused Ukraine of attacking its border crossing points and towns.

‘Difficult and hard’

Ukraine said on Friday it was trying to break Russia’s siege of Mariupol and that fighting raged around the Illich Steel and Iron Works and port.

“The situation in Mariupol is difficult and hard. Fighting is happening right now. The Russian army is constantly calling on additional units to storm the city,” defence ministry spokesman said.

(New York Times News Service)