Mar 20, 2022: According to a report by AFP, one of Europe’s biggest iron and steel works, Azovstal, has been badly damaged as Russian forces lay siege to the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol.

Azovstal is part of the Metinvest group, which is controlled by Ukraine’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov.

Ukrainian lawmaker Lesia Vasylenko shared the news on twitter saying, “One of the biggest metallurgic plants in Europe destroyed. The economic losses for Ukraine are huge. The environment is devastated,”

She posted a video of explosions on an industrial site, with thick columns of grey and black smoke rising from the buildings, while one of her colleagues, Serhiy Taruta, wrote on Facebook that Russian forces “had practically destroyed the factory”.

Meanwhile, Azovstal’s director general Enver Tskitishvili took to messaging app Telegram saying, “We will return to the city, rebuild the enterprise and revive it,”

“Coke oven batteries no longer pose a danger to the lives of residents,” he wrote. “We have also stopped the blast furnaces correctly.”

He said that when the invasion began on February 24, the factory had taken measures to reduce the environmental damage in the event of being hit.

As Ukrainian and Russian forces battled over the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, Vadym Denysenko, adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, said. “One of the largest metallurgical plants in Europe is actually being destroyed,” Denysenko said in televised remarks.

Russian forces have already cut Mariupol off from the Sea of Azov, and its fall would link Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, to eastern territories controlled by Moscow-backed separatists. It would mark a rare advance in the face of fierce Ukrainian resistance that has dashed Russia’s hopes for a quick victory and galvanised the West.

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