Russia renews attack on Mariupol, Ukraine says

STORY: Russia on Saturday resumed its assault on the last Ukrainian defenders holed up in a giant steel plant in Mariupol... days after Moscow declared victory in the southern city and said its forces did not need to take the plant.

Ukraine’s Azov Battalion - a nationalist militia prominent in the defense of Mariupol - released a video Saturday, it said, showed women and children sheltering in the complex.

UNIDENTIFIED BOY: "(I hope) we can leave here and see the sun, because we've been sat here for two months already."

Reuters could not independently verify where or when the video was shot.

The attack on Mariupol, the biggest battle of the conflict, has raged for weeks as Russia seeks to capture a city seen as vital to its attempts to link the eastern Donbas region with Crimea, which Moscow seized in 2014.

Ukraine’s army was not ready to try break through the siege of the port city by force, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

But - he told reporters at an evening news conference that Kyiv had every right to do so.

Zelenskiy also said that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin would visit Kyiv on Sunday, and that he planned to discuss the types of heavy weapons Ukraine needs to battle the Russian invasion.

"We will talk about the weapons we need and about the time framework for deliveries. I would like to reiterate that during the last week, I believe that during the last week the signals, the messages, the steps, the timings, the quantities, I am talking about weapons from the United States, all this has improved."

In the city of Odesa, video from Saturday showed residents being rescued by firefighters as smoke billowed from a building. According to the Ukrainian armed forces, two missiles struck a military facility and residential buildings in the city… and Zelenskiy said at least eight people died.

The death toll could not be independently verified.

The Russian defense ministry said it used high-precision missiles on Saturday to destroy a logistics terminal in Odesa where a large number of weapons supplied by the U.S. and European nations were being stored.

It also said Russian forces had killed up to 200 Ukrainian troops.