President Putin's Strict Order To Defense Minister Shoigu: Cancel The Raid On The Mariupol Factory, Block It Until The Flies Can't Enter

JAKARTA - Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the cancellation of an attack on a steel factory in Mariupol, the last stronghold where Ukrainian soldiers and citizens are hiding.

Effectively declaring victory in the city after nearly two months of siege, President Putin said there was no point in trying to stamp out the fighters barricaded inside the sprawling factory.

"I consider the proposed invasion of industrial zones unnecessary", he told Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu during a televised meeting in the Kremlin.

"I ordered you to cancel it", he insisted.

"There is no need to climb into this catacomb and crawl underground through this industrial facility. Block this industrial area so that even a fly cannot enter", he said.

Defense Minister Shoigu estimates 2,000 Ukrainian fighters are still in the factory. President Putin called on them to surrender, saying Russia would treat them with respect.

Overnight, Mikhailo Podolyak, Ukraine's chief negotiator, suggested that talks be held within Mariupol itself about the fate of its final defenders.

"Without any conditions. We are ready to hold a 'special round of negotiations' right in Mariupol", he tweeted late Wednesday.

"One on one. Two against two. To save our people, Azov (battalion), military, civilians, children, the living, and the wounded, all of them. Because they are ours. Because they are in my heart, forever ."

The former city of 400,000 people on the Sea of Azov, which was bombarded and besieged since the start of the war, has become the scene of the heaviest fighting and the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the conflict.

Ukraine says tens of thousands of civilians have died there. But Russia is now saying that, apart from a huge steel mill, the city is effectively under its control.

A commander of the Azov regiment rejected Russia's demands for the defenders to surrender. In the video, Svyatoslav Palamar calls for a "third party" to ensure the safety of hundreds of civilians sheltering in factory bunkers.

"Let me say, we do not accept the conditions set by the Russian Federation for surrendering our weapons and our defenders surrendering themselves as prisoners", Palamar said.

Russia has blocked all attempts by Ukraine to send aid to Mariupol or buses to evacuate civilians to Ukrainian-controlled territory, and Kyiv accuses it of forcibly deporting tens of thousands of residents to Russia. Moscow says Russia has taken 140,000 civilians in the humanitarian evacuation.

Mariupol is the link Moscow needs to provide secure connections between territory held by the separatists it supports in eastern Ukraine's Donbas region and Crimea, the peninsula it captured in 2014. It is also the main port of the Donbas.