“We managed to find a preliminary agreement (with the Russians) on a humanitarian corridor for women, children and the elderly,” Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said on Telegram. The corridor is established towards the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhya in the south of the country.
An agreement has been reached with Russia on a humanitarian corridor to evacuate civilians from the besieged port of Mariupol in southeastern Ukraine, the first such agreement since Saturday, a Ukrainian official said on Wednesday. “We managed to find a preliminary agreement (with the Russians) on a humanitarian corridor for women, children and the elderly,” Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said on Telegram. The corridor is established towards the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhya (south). “Given the catastrophic situation in Mariupol, we are focusing our efforts on this direction today,” said Iryna Vereshchuk.
No evacuation since Saturday
No evacuation corridor had been set up in Ukraine since Saturday, for lack of agreement with the Russians who have intensified their strikes in eastern Ukraine in recent days. A total of 300,000 Ukrainians have been evacuated through humanitarian corridors since the start of the war on February 24, according to a figure released Tuesday evening by the Ukrainian Ministry of Reintegration.
“Since the beginning of the war, the Ukrainian government has proposed more than 340 humanitarian corridors. The (Russian) occupiers have accepted about 300 of them and de facto 176 have really worked,” said the ministry, which accuses the Russians of having violated the ceasefire or blocked the evacuation buses on several occasions, which Moscow rejects.