Russian forces in Ukraine attempted on Saturday to storm a steelworks housing soldiers and civilians in the southern city of Mariupol in a bid to crush the last pocket of resistance in a place of deep symbolic and strategic value for Moscow, Ukrainian officials said. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy meanwhile announced that he would meet in his country’s capital on Sunday with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. The White House declined to comment. Speaking at a press conference, Zelenskyy gave few details on the logistics of the meeting, but said he expected concrete results – “not just gifts or some kind of cake, we expect specific things and specific weapons”. It would be the first high-profile US trip to kyiv since the war began on Feb. 24. During a visit to Poland in March, Blinken briefly visited Ukrainian soil to meet with the country’s foreign minister. Zelenskyy’s last face-to-face with an American leader was on February 19 with Vice President Kamala Harris.

In attacks on the eve of Orthodox Easter, Russian forces pounded towns and villages in southern and eastern Ukraine. A 3-month-old baby was among eight people killed when Russia fired cruise missiles at the Black Sea port city of Odessa, officials said. Zelenskyy said 18 others were injured.

“The war started when this baby was a month old. Can you imagine what is happening? Zelensky said. “They’re just bastards. …I have no other words for it, just bastards.” Ukraine’s military said on Saturday it had destroyed a Russian command post in Kherson, a southern city that fell to Russian forces early in the war.

The command post was hit on Friday, killing two generals and seriously wounding another, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said in a statement. The Russian military did not comment on this claim, which could not be confirmed.

Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Zelenskyy, said in an online interview that 50 senior Russian officers were in the command center when it was attacked.

The fate of the Ukrainians in the sprawling and beleaguered seaside steelworks of Mariupol, where Russia says its forces have taken the rest of the city, was not immediately clear. Earlier on Saturday, a Ukrainian military unit released a video believed to have been taken two days earlier in which women and children locked underground, some for up to two months, said they yearned to see the sun. “We want to see peaceful skies, we want to breathe fresh air,” one woman said in the video. “You just have no idea what it means to us to just eat, drink sweet tea. For us, that’s already happiness.” Russia said it took control of several villages elsewhere in the eastern Donbass region and destroyed 11 Ukrainian military targets overnight, including three artillery depots. Russian attacks also hit populated areas. Associated Press reporters observed shelling in residential areas of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city; Regional Governor Oleh Sinehubov said three people were killed. In the Donbass region of Luhansk, Governor Serhiy Haidai said six people died in the shelling of a village, Gorsky. In Sloviansk, a city in northern Donbass, the AP saw two soldiers arrive at the hospital, one of them fatally wounded.

Sitting in a wheelchair outside her damaged apartment in Sloviansk, Anna Direnskaya, 70, said: “I want peace. “Why is this happening?” she said. “I do not know.” While British officials said Russian forces had not gained significant ground, Ukrainian officials announced a nationwide curfew ahead of Easter Sunday. , a sign of the disruption of the war and the threat to the whole country. Mariupol was a key Russian objective and took on outsized importance in the war. Completing its capture would give Russia its biggest victory yet, after a nearly two-month siege reduced much of the city to smoldering ruins, depriving Ukraine of a vital port, freeing Russian troops to fight elsewhere and would establish a land corridor to the Crimean peninsula, which Moscow seized in 2014. The ists control parts of Donbass. An adviser to Ukraine’s presidential office, Oleksiy Arestovych, said Russian forces had resumed airstrikes on the Azovstal factory and were also trying to storm it, in an apparent reversal of tactics. Two days earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin had given the order not to send troops but to blockade the factory. Ukrainian officials estimated that around 2,000 of their soldiers were inside the plant, along with civilians sheltering in its underground tunnels. Earlier on Saturday, the Azov Regiment of the Ukrainian National Guard, which has members locked in the factory, released video of around two dozen women and children. Its contents could not be independently verified. But if authentic, it would be the first video testimony of what life was like for civilians trapped underground. The video shows soldiers giving candy to children who respond with punches. A young girl says she and her loved ones “have not seen the sky or the sun” since leaving home on February 27. The regiment’s deputy commander, Sviatoslav Palamar, told the AP that the video was shot on Thursday. The Azov Regiment has its roots in the Azov Battalion, which was formed by far-right activists in 2014 at the start of the separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine and drew criticism for some of its tactics. It is believed that more than 100,000 people – against a pre-war population of around 430,000 – remained in Mariupol with little food, water or heating. Ukrainian authorities estimate that more than 20,000 civilians were killed in the city. Another attempt to evacuate women, children and the elderly from Mariupol failed on Saturday. Petro Andryushchenko, adviser to the mayor of Mariupol, said Russian forces had not allowed buses organized by Ukraine to take residents to Zaporizhzhia, a town 227 kilometers (141 miles) to the northwest. “At 11 a.m., at least 200 residents of Mariupol gathered near the Port City shopping center, awaiting evacuation,” Andryushchenko said on the Telegram messaging app. “The Russian army drove to the people of Mariupol and ordered them to disperse because now there will be shelling.” At the same time, he said, Russian buses gathered about 200 meters (yards) away. Residents who boarded were told they were being taken to separatist-occupied territory and were not allowed to disembark, Andryushchenko said. His account could not be independently verified. During the attack on Odessa, Russian troops fired at least six missiles, according to Anton Gerashchenko, adviser to the Ukrainian interior minister. “City residents heard explosions in different neighborhoods,” Gerashchenko said via Telegram. “Apartment buildings were hit. We already know a victim. He burned in his car in a courtyard of one of the buildings.” Zelenskyy’s press conference took place at a kyiv metro station, where he stopped at one point as a train rumbled past. The metro system, which includes the deepest station in the world, attracted widespread attention at the start of the war when hordes of people took refuge there. Regarding the planned visit of American officials on Sunday, Zelenskyy said: “I think that we can get from the United States some agreements or part of this package on the armament of Ukraine that we have agreed on more early. In addition, we have strategic questions about security guarantees, which it is time to talk about in detail because the United States will be one of those leaders of safe countries for our state.”

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