Not a fly should escape: Vladimir Putin’s order on Mariupol

TIL Desk/World/Moscow/ Russia’s Vladimir Putin orders military to not storm the steel facility in Mariupol, where Ukrainian forces are holding out. Instead he wants it to be blocked off so ‘not even a fly can escape’.

 His defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, said the rest of the city beyond the sprawling Azovstal steel plant where Ukrainian forces were holed has been liberated – as Russian officials refer to areas of Ukraine they have seized. Putin hailed that as a success.

But leaving the plant in Ukrainian hands robs the Russians of the ability to declare complete victory in Mariupol, which has seen some of the most dramatic fighting of the war and whose capture has both strategic and symbolic importance.