The Ukrainian authorities announced late on Monday an end to their combat operation in the besieged city of Mariupol, where Ukrainian fighters have held out for weeks in the face of near-constant Russian bombardment.

The military ordered the remaining troops who had been sheltering beneath a steel factory there to focus on efforts “to save the lives of their personnel”.

“We hope that we will be able to save the lives of our guys,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a late-night video address. “I want to emphasise that Ukraine needs Ukrainian heroes alive.”

The Azovstal steel plant — the last stand of Ukrainian resistance in the decimated city — has become a powerful symbol of the suffering inflicted by Russia and the stalwart bravery of Ukrainian defenders. Billboards and murals supporting the city and the plant have appeared across the country.

In a statement late on Monday, Ukraine’s General Staff said that the Mariupol garrison had “fulfilled its combat mission”.

Ukrainian officials said that evacuations from the Azovstal steel factory had begun. The military said that 264 service members, 53 of them “seriously injured”, had been taken by bus to areas controlled by Russian forces.

The announcement came hours after the Russian news media began reporting that buses of Ukrainian servicemen were being evacuated from the steelworks, near the centre of Mariupol, the last territory in the city not to fall to Russian troops.

Deputy defence minister Anna Malyar said that 53 “seriously injured” people had been evacuated to a medical facility in Novoazovsk, a Ukrainian town near the Russian border controlled by Moscow-backed separatists. According to the Ukrainian military’s General Staff, another 211 people were evacuated via a humanitarian corridor to Olenivka, also under Russian control, and would then be returned to Ukrainian-held territory “under an exchange procedure”.

It was unclear how many soldiers remained inside the plant, with officials and relatives of the fighters saying in recent days that there could be as many as 2,000, including hundreds who were injured. Ukraine’s General Staff said that “measures to save the defenders who remain on the territory of Azovstal are ongoing”.

The evacuation comes after weeks of pleas from the soldiers and civilians who had been holed up in the factory with inadequate supplies or medical care.

New York Times News Service