Where the war stood on 10 May 2022

What did the battlefield and diplomatic picture look like on 10 May 2022? The reports from the preceding days point to a war concentrated on a few places, with Mariupol's Azovstal steel works at the centre.

Azovstal under assault

On 4 May, Ukraine confirmed that Russian troops had entered the steel works after what it called an all-out assault. The same day, Russian forces were reported to have bombarded the plant with thermobaric missiles, and Mariupol's mayor, Vadym Boychenko, confirmed that contact had been lost with Ukrainian soldiers trapped inside. On 5 May, Ukrainian forces said they had repelled a Russian thrust onto the site. By 7 May, Ukraine said all women, children and elderly people had been evacuated from the plant.

The Associated Press also confirmed on 4 May that about 600 people had died in the Mariupol theatre airstrike. That attack took place on 16 March, when the building was serving as an air raid shelter for a large number of civilians.

Strikes elsewhere

The violence was not confined to Mariupol. On 7 May, four Russian missiles struck the port city of Odesa. The same day, Russian forces bombed a school in Bilohorivka, in Luhansk Oblast's Sievierodonetsk Raion. Only two deaths were confirmed, but around sixty people were believed to have been killed.

On 6 May, Ukrainian MP Oleksiy Goncharenko claimed that the Russian frigate Admiral Makarov had been hit by Neptune anti-ship missiles off Snake Island. Russia said it had no information about a strike.

Terms for talks

Also on 6 May, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine was open to continuing peace talks with Russia, but only if Moscow guaranteed the restoration of preinvasion borders, returned Ukrainians forcibly taken to Russia, and withdrew its troops from the country. Those conditions set the terms of Kyiv's position as the fighting continued.

Effects beyond Ukraine

The war's effects were also being reported further afield. On 9 May, Iranians in Moldova were urged to leave the country because of rising tensions in pro-Russian Transnistria and spillover from the war. On 7 May, the Airline Operators of Nigeria announced that its members would suspend domestic flights from the following Monday, in protest at rising fuel prices caused by the war.

Taken together, the reports from the days up to 10 May 2022 show a conflict in which a besieged industrial site, strikes on a port and a school, and firm negotiating conditions coexisted with economic and regional pressures well beyond Ukraine's borders.