Dozens more civilians were rescued Friday from the tunnels under the besieged steel mill where Ukrainian fighters in Mariupol have been making their last stand to prevent Moscow’s complete takeover of the strategically important port city. Russian and Ukrainian officials said 50 people were evacuated from the Azovstal plant and handed over to representatives of the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross. The Russian military said the group included 11 children. Russian officials and Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said evacuation efforts would continue Saturday. The latest evacuees were in addition to roughly 500 other civilians who got out of the plant and city in recent days. The fight for the last Ukrainian stronghold in a city reduced to ruins by the Russian onslaught appeared increasingly desperate amid growing speculation that President Vladimir Putin wants to finish the battle for Mariupol so he can present a triumph to the Russian people in time for Monday’s Victory Day, the biggest patriotic holiday on the Russian calendar. As the holiday commemorating the Soviet Union’s World War II victory over Nazi Germany approached, cities across Ukraine prepared for an expected increase in Russian attacks, and officials urged residents to heed air raid warnings. “These symbolic dates are to the Russian aggressor like red to a bull,” said Ukraine’s first deputy interior minister, Yevhen Yenin. “While the entire civilized world remembers the victims of terrible wars on these days, the Russian Federation wants parades and is preparing to dance over bones in Mariupol.” Also Read: Defenders inside Ukrainian steel mill refuse to surrender By Russia’s most recent estimate, roughly 2,000 Ukrainian fighters are holed up in the vast maze of tunnels and bunkers beneath the Azovstal steelworks, and they have repeatedly refused to surrender. Ukrainian officials said before Friday’s evacuations that a few hundred civilians were also trapped there, and fears for their safety have increased as the battle has grown fiercer in recent days. Kateryna Prokopenko, whose husband, Denys Prokopenko, commands the Azov Regiment troops inside the plant, issued a desperate plea to also spare the fighters. She said they would be willing to go to a third country to wait out the war but would never surrender to Russia because that would mean “filtration camps, prison, torture and death.” If nothing is done to save her husband and his men, they will “stand to the end without surrender,” she told The Associated Press on Friday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said “influential states” are involved in efforts to rescue the soldiers, although he did not mention any by name. “We are also working on diplomatic options to save our troops who are still at Azovstal,” he said in his nightly video address. Also read: 7.7 million people displaced inside Ukraine U.N. officials have been tight-lipped about the civilian evacuation efforts, but it seemed likely that the latest evacuees would be taken to Zaporizhzhia, a Ukrainian-controlled city about 140 miles (230 kilometers) northwest of Mariupol where others who escaped the port city were brought. Some of the plant’s previous evacuees spoke to the AP about the horrors of being surrounded by death in the moldy, underground bunker with little food and water, poor medical care and diminishing hope. Some said they felt guilty for leaving others behind.  “People literally rot like our jackets did,” said 31-year-old Serhii Kuzmenko, who fled with his wife, 8-year-old daughter and four others from their bunker, where 30 others were left behind. “They need our help badly. We need to get them out.” Fighters defending the plant said Friday on the Telegram messaging app that Russian troops had fired on an evacuation vehicle on the plant’s grounds. They said the car was moving toward civilians when it was hit by shelling, and that one soldier was killed and six were wounded. Moscow did not immediately acknowledge renewed fighting there Friday. Russia took control of the rest of Mariupol after bombarding it for two months. Ahead of Victory Day, municipal workers and volunteers cleaned up what remains of the city, which had a prewar population of more than 400,000. Perhaps 100,000 civilians remain there with scarce supplies of food, water electricity and heat. Bulldozers scooped up debris, and people swept streets against a backdrop of hollowed-out buildings. Russian flags were hoisted. The fall of Mariupol would deprive Ukraine of a vital port. It would also allow Russia to establish a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014, and free some Russian troops to fight elsewhere in the Donbas, the eastern industrial region that the Kremlin says is now its chief objective. Its capture also holds symbolic value since the city has been the scene of some of the worst suffering of the war and a surprisingly fierce resistance. While they pounded away at the plant, Russian forces struggled to make significant gains elsewhere, 10 weeks into a devastating war that has killed thousands of people, forced millions to flee the country and flattened large swaths of cities. Ukrainian officials said the risk of massive shelling increased ahead of Victory Day. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said authorities would reinforce street patrols in the capital. A curfew was going into effect in Ukraine’s southern Odesa region, which was the target of two missile attacks Friday. The Ukrainian military’s general staff said Friday that its forces repelled 11 attacks in the Donbas region and destroyed tanks and armored vehicles, further frustrating Putin’s ambitions after his abortive attempt to seize Kyiv. Russia made no acknowledgement of the losses. The Ukrainian army also said it made progress in the northeastern Kharkiv region, recapturing five villages and part of a sixth. Meanwhile, one person was reported dead and three more were wounded Friday as a result of Russian shelling in Lyman, a city in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.

Ukrainian civilians holed up inside a steel plant in Mariupol under siege by Russian forces nearly two months began evacuating over the weekend and people sheltering elsewhere in the city were to leave Monday, local officials said. Video posted online Sunday by Ukrainian forces showed elderly women and mothers with small children climbing over a steep pile of rubble from the sprawling Azovstal steel plant and eventually boarding a bus. More than 100 civilians were expected to arrive in the Ukrainian-controlled city of Zaporizhzhia on Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Sunday. “Today, for the first time in all the days of the war, this vitally needed (humanitarian) corridor has started working,” Zelenskyy said in a pre-recorded address published on his Telegram messaging channel. There were worries about the evacuees’ safety. People fleeing Russian-occupied areas in the past have said their vehicles were fired on, and Ukrainian officials have repeatedly accused Russian forces of shelling agreed-upon evacuation routes. A Ukrainian defender of the steel plant urged groups like the U.N. and the Red Cross to ensure the safety of those being evacuated. Sviatoslav Palamar, deputy commander of the Azov Regiment, told The Associated Press in an interview that there should be guarantees from “a third party -- politicians, world leaders -- who will cooperate to negotiate with Russians to extract us from here.” Another of the plant’s defenders said Russian forces resumed shelling the plant Sunday as soon as the civilians were evacuated. Denys Shlega, commander of the 12th Operational Brigade of Ukraine’s National Guard, said in a televised interview Sunday night that several hundred civilians are still trapped alongside nearly 500 wounded soldiers and “numerous” dead bodies. “Several dozen small children are still in the bunkers underneath the plant,” Shlega said. Also Read: Evacuations underway in Mariupol; Pelosi visits Ukraine As many as 100,000 people may still be in Mariupol, including an estimated 2,000 Ukrainian fighters beneath the sprawling, Soviet-era steel plant — the only part of the city not occupied by the Russians. Mariupol, a port city on the Sea of Azov, has seen some of the worst suffering. A Russian airstrike hit a maternity hospital in early weeks of the war, and hundreds of people were reported killed when a theater was bombed. The city is a key target because of its strategic location near the Crimea Peninsula, which Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014. Palamar, the Ukrainian commander, told the AP on Sunday that reaching some of the wounded in the steel plant is difficult. “There’s rubble. We have no special equipment. It’s hard for soldiers to pick up slabs weighing tons only with their arms,” he said. “We hear voices of people who are still alive” inside shattered buildings. U.N. humanitarian spokesman Saviano Abreu said civilians arriving in Zaporizhzhia, about 140 miles (230 kilometers) northwest of Mariupol, would get immediate support, including psychological services. A Doctors Without Borders team was waiting for the U.N. convoy at a reception center for displaced people in the city. Palamar called for the evacuation of wounded Ukrainian fighters as well as civilians. “We don’t know why they are not taken away, and their evacuation to the territory controlled by Ukraine is not being discussed,” he said in a video posted Saturday on the regiment’s Telegram channel. Along with his Azov regiment, Palamar said, marines, police officers, border guards, coast guard and are defending the plant. The bodies of dead Ukrainian fighters remain inside the plant, he said, “because we believe we will be able to move them to Ukrainian government-controlled territory. We have to do everything to bury heroes with honors.” U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other U.S. lawmakers visited Zelenskyy on Saturday to show American support. In his nightly address Sunday, Zelenskyy accused Moscow of waging “a war of extermination,” saying Russian shelling had hit food, grain and fertilizer warehouses, and residential neighborhoods in the Kharkiv, Donbas and other regions. More than 350,000 people have been evacuated from combat zones thanks to humanitarian corridors pre-agreed with Moscow, he said, adding the “organization of humanitarian corridors is one of the elements of the negotiation process which is ongoing.” In Zaporizhzhia, residents ignored air raid sirens to visit cemeteries on Sunday, the Orthodox Christian day of the dead. Also Read: Pelosi leads delegation to Kyiv and Poland; Vows US support “If our dead could rise and see this, they would say, ‘It’s not possible, they’re worse than the Germans,’” Hennadiy Bondarenko, 61, said while marking the day with his family at a picnic table among the graves. “All our dead would join the fighting, including the Cossacks.” Russian forces embarked on a major military operation to seize parts of southern and eastern Ukraine after failing to capture the capital, Kyiv. Ukrainian forces are fighting their offensive village-by-village while civilians flee airstrikes and artillery shelling. Ukrainian intelligence officials accused Russian forces of seizing medical facilities to treat wounded Russian soldiers in several occupied towns, and of destroying medical infrastructure. A full picture of battle unfolding in eastern Ukraine is hard to capture. The fighting makes it dangerous for reporters to move around, and both sides have introduced tight restrictions on reporting from the combat zone.   But Western military analysts have suggested Russia’s offensive is progressing more slowly than planned. So far, Russian troops and Russian-backed separatists appear to have made only minor gains since the eastern offensive began last month. The British Defense Ministry said in a daily briefing Monday that it believes more than a quarter of all troops Russia has deployed in Ukraine are “combat ineffective.” That phrase refers to a military’s ability to wage war, which is affected by losing soldiers to wounds and death and having equipment damaged or destroyed. The British military believes Russia committed over 120 so-called “battalion tactical groups” into the war since February, which represents 65% of all of Moscow’s combat strength. Some of Russia’s most elite forces “have suffered the highest levels of attrition,” the ministry said in its briefing on Twitter. “It will probably take years for Russia to reconstitute these forces.” Hundreds of millions of dollars in military assistance has flowed into Ukraine during the war, but Russia’s vast armories mean Ukraine still needs massive support. With plenty of firepower still in reserve, Russia’s offensive could intensify. Overall, the Russian army has an estimated 900,000 active-duty personnel, and a much larger air force and navy. Meanwhile, recent weeks have seen a number of fires and explosions in Russian regions near the border. On Sunday, an explosive device damaged a railway bridge in the Kursk region, which borders Ukraine, and a criminal investigation has been started, the region’s government reported.