“We want to return home, we want to return alive…It’s dim here, not like outside.” These are the haunting words of Ukrainian children heard on a video that has emerged from inside the besieged Azovstal steel plant. 

The footage, released by the Azov regiment of Ukraine’s National Guard, shows for the first time dozens of women and children surviving in desperate conditions inside the plant’s underground tunnels.

It comes as Russian forces have reportedly resumed air strikes and are trying to storm the steelworks, Ukraine’s presidential adviser has said.

Speaking on national television, Oleksiy Arestovych said: “The enemy is trying to strangle the final resistance of the defenders of Mariupol in the Azovstal area.”

In the video footage, one woman can be seen saying: “We want to see peaceful skies, we want to breathe in fresh air.”

The steel plant is thought to be the last bastion of Ukrainian resistance in Mariupol.

Another young girl in the video says that she left home with her relatives on Feb 27 and since then, they have seen “neither the sky, nor the sun”.

“We really want to get out of here safely, so that no one gets hurt,” the girl pleads in the video which was shot on Thursday.

More than one thousand civilians, including women and children, remain trapped at Azovstal together with the Ukrainian troops holed up there, according to Ukrainian authorities.

The attack on the complex comes just days after Vladimir Putin declared victory in the battle for the city and said its forces did not need to take the factory.

Earlier in the week  Vladimir Putin announced that Mariupol had been “liberated” and instructed his army not to storm the Azovstal stronghold but rather seal it off, in an apparent bid to free up Russian troops for elsewhere in eastern Ukraine.