KYIV (Reuters) – All the children, women and elderly who had taken refuge in the basements of the Azovstal Mariupol metalworks have been evacuated, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk said on Saturday, President Volodimir Zelensky saying now hope to do the same with wounded soldiers.
As Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Saturday night that the evacuation of civilians from Mariupol was complete after three days of a “regime of silence” which Ukrainians say was broken, Kyiv says work to establish new humanitarian corridors.
“We are preparing for the second phase of the evacuation, that of the wounded and the doctors”, declared Volodimir Zelensky after the announcement by Irina Vereshchuk that with the extraction of the last women and children, “this part of the humanitarian operation of Mariupol is over”.
The Ukrainian president, who had indicated on Friday that influential intermediaries were involved in the discussions with Moscow, also said that he was working to evacuate the fighters entrenched in the basements of the Azovstal factory, while acknowledging that it is a question of a “very difficult” task, with Russia apparently unwilling to let them go.
According to Volodimir Zelensky, who spoke on television, more than 300 civilians were evacuated from the gigantic metallurgical complex in convoys organized by the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) bound for the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhya.
The Russian Ministry of Defense has advanced for its part the figure of 51 civilians evacuated in three days, specifying that it was 18 men, 22 women and 11 children.
Fifty civilians were evacuated on Friday, according to the Ukrainian authorities, and dozens more the previous week.
THE BOMBING CONTINUES
It was estimated on Friday that 200 civilians were still holed up in the huge industrial complex’s networks of tunnels and shelters with limited access to water and food.
The Ukrainian soldiers took refuge in the steelworks when the Russian army seized the rest of the city of Mariupol, which it claimed to conquer on 21 April.
It is the last bastion of resistance for Ukrainian forces in this port city in south-eastern Ukraine which is of strategic importance for both Kyiv and Moscow and which has become one of the bloodiest battlefields in the war.
The fighters promised not to surrender. But Kyiv estimates that the Russian army could intensify its offensive with the approach of May 9, Monday, day of commemoration of the victory of the Soviet Union on Nazi Germany during the Second World War.
Moscow, which continues to speak of a “special military operation” in connection with the invasion of Ukraine launched on February 24, has reoriented its offensive in the east and south of the country in recent weeks, having failed to take Kyiv. , the capital.
Besides Mariupol, the Russian army continues its bombing operations near Kharkiv, according to the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Three bridges were destroyed to slow down the Ukrainian army’s counter-offensives, kyiv said.
For his part, the Russian Minister of Defense said he destroyed Saturday with “high precision missiles” aerodromes and Ukrainian planes in several cities of the country, including Odessa.
It has not been possible to independently verify the accuracy of this information on either side.
(Report Pavel Polityuk, with Alessandra Prentice, Natalia Zinets, Ronald Popeski, French version Caroline Pailliez and Tangi Salan)