IIn the port city of Mariupol, an escape corridor for civilians from the embattled Azovstal steelworks was planned on Friday. “Today an operation is planned to get the civilians out of the plant,” the presidential office in Kyiv said. Evacuation campaigns from the city of 400,000 inhabitants, which had been surrounded by Russian troops since the beginning of March, had repeatedly failed. A large number of civilians and soldiers have taken refuge in the steelworks.
According to the defenders, the field hospital set up there came under heavy fire on Thursday night. At least one soldier was killed and around 100 patients sustained further injuries. During his visit to Kyiv on Thursday, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the city’s people urgently needed “a ceasefire, freedom of movement and supplies. Mariupol is a crisis within a crisis. People need an escape route from the apocalypse.”
Guterres said after his visit to Moscow earlier this week that the Russian president had “agreed in principle that the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross will be involved in the evacuation of civilians from the Azovstal plant in Mariupol.” After that, however, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Guterres “raised the issue and it will be worked on further. There were no concrete agreements on this.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyj said: “We also need the Russian side, which approaches the matter without cynicism and actually implements what it says.”
An adviser to the mayor of Mariupol, Petro Andryushchenko, circulated images of the “final fighting” around the steel mill via telegram on Friday. A video shows soldiers with white armbands worn by Russian troops in Ukraine running towards a building; one falls while others try to carry him away. On Thursday, the occupiers tried unsuccessfully to storm the plant using tanks.
In the Donbass, the Russian army did not report any significant gains in territory, apparently concentrating on artillery attacks. Russia admitted for the first time that it had also used a submarine against Ukrainian targets. The Russian Defense Ministry said it fired Kalibr guided missiles at Ukrainian targets from a submarine in the Black Sea. Ukrainian troops have reportedly shelled and damaged an oil depot in the pro-Russian separatist-held city of Donetsk. Images published online showed the plant burning.
Ukrainian media reports the shooting down of a SU34 fighter-bomber near Kharkiv. Meanwhile, the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine was officially declared over on Thursday evening. Russia gave the organization no choice by voting against an extension of the mandate at the end of March, explained the incumbent OSCE President, Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau.