KYIV: Russian forces were continuing their airstrikes on the Azovstal steel mill in Mariupol and pressing their advance on towns in eastern Ukraine, the general staff of Ukraine’s armed forces said on Thursday.

The bombardment came as Ukraine offered to release Russian prisoners of war (POW) in exchange for the safe evacuation of the badly injured fighters that remained trapped inside the factory in the ruined southern port city.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said negotiations were underway to release the injured fighters who are holed up in the last bastion of Ukrainian resistance in Mariupol. There are different options, but “none of them is ideal,” she added.

Petro Andriushchenko, an adviser to Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko, said Russian forces have blocked all evacuation routes out of the city. He said there were few apartment buildings fit to live in and little food or drinking water. Some remaining residents are cooperating with occupying Russian forces in exchange for food, he added.

“The occupiers turned Mariupol into a medieval ghetto,” Boychenko said in comments published by city hall, as he called for a complete evacuation of the city.

Elsewhere, Kyiv was preparing for its first war crimes trial of a captured Russian soldier, who is alleged to have gunned down an unarmed civilian riding a bicycle.

And overnight airstrikes in the northern Chernihiv region killed three people and injured 12, according to local media, citing emergency services. Its regional governor said the strikes on the town of Novhorod-Siverskyi damaged a boarding school, dormitory and administrative building.

In its operational statement for Day 78 of the war, the Ukrainian military said Russian forces also fired artillery and grenade launchers at Ukrainian troops in the direction of Zaporizhzhia, which has been a refuge for civilians fleeing Mariupol.

It also said Russian forces had fired artillery at Ukrainian units north of the city of Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine, and reported Russian strikes in the Chernihiv and Sumy regions to the north.

‘Partial success’

Across the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine, the site of sustained fighting since the war began, the Ukrainian general staff noted “partial success” in Russia’s advance. It said Ukrainian forces repulsed nine attacks by Russian forces and destroyed several drones and military vehicles. The information could not be independently verified.

Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said her office had charged Russian Sgt. Vadin Shyshimarin, 21, in the killing of an unarmed 62-year-old civilian who was gunned down while riding a bicycle in late February. Shyshimarin, who served with a tank unit, was accused of firing through a car window on the man in the northeastern village of Chupakhivka.

The soldier could get up to 15 years in prison, Venediktova said, but did not add when his trial would start. Her office has been investigating more than 10,700 allegations of war crimes committed by Russian forces and has identified over 600 suspects.

Many of the atrocities came to light last month after Moscow’s forces aborted their bid to capture Kyiv and withdrew from around the capital, exposing mass graves and streets and yards strewn with bodies in towns such as Bucha. Residents told of killings, burnings, rape, torture and dismemberment.

Volodymyr Yavorskyy of the Center for Civil Liberties said the Ukrainian human rights group would be closely following Shyshimarin’s trial to see if it was fair.

“It’s very difficult to observe all the rules, norms and neutrality of the court proceedings in wartime,” he added.

In the southern Kherson region, site of the first major Ukrainian city to fall in the war, a Moscowappointed

leader said officials there want Russian President Vladimir Putin to annex the area. Kirill Stremousov, deputy head of the Kherson regional administration appointed by Moscow, told Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency: “The city of Kherson is Russia.”

That was something at least one resident contested. “All people in Kherson are waiting for our troops to come as soon as possible,” said a teacher who gave only her first name, Olga, out of fear of retaliation. “Nobody wants to live in Russia or join Russia.”

The development raised the possibility that the Kremlin would seek to break off another piece of Ukraine as it tries to salvage an invasion gone awry. Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, which borders Kherson, after a disputed referendum in 2014, a move denounced as illegal and rejected by most of the international community.