The deputy commander of the Azov regiment, which defends the site, hopes that these women and children will be “evacuated to Zaporijjia, on the territory controlled by Ukraine”.
Twenty civilians left the Azovstal factory in Mariupol, a port in southeastern Ukraine besieged by the Russians, on Saturday to be evacuated to Zaporijjia, the Azov regiment which defends the site announced.
Read alsoWar in Ukraine: Azov Battalion Releases Video Showing Civilians Entrenched in Azovstal Factory in Mariupol
“Twenty civilians, women and children (…) have been transferred to an agreed location and we hope that they will be evacuated to Zaporizhia, in the territory controlled by Ukrainesaid Sviatoslav Palamar, deputy commander of the Azov regiment in a video on Telegram. A few hours earlier, the official Russian agency Tass announced that a group of 25 civilians, including six children, had been able to get out of Azovstal, a huge steelworks where hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians are blocked. No attempt to evacuate Azovstal has been successful so far.
“All night, enemy artillery bombarded the site. The ceasefire which was supposed to start at 6:00 a.m. (3:00 GMT) did not start until 11:00 a.m. Since both parties respect it. The evacuation convoy we were expecting at 6:00 a.m. did not arrive until 6:25 p.m.», according to Sviatoslav Palamar. “The Azov regiment continues to clear the rubble to get civilians out. We hope that this process will continue and that we will succeed in evacuating all civilians“, he added.
Hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, including dozens of children, are stranded, according to kyiv, at the Azovstal site, with the last Ukrainian fighters in the city, almost completely destroyed and controlled by Russian forces after weeks of siege . The Ukrainian presidency had announced the day before that the evacuation of the civilians holed up in the Azovstal factory wasconsidered” for Friday. The UN coordinator in Ukraine, Osnat Lubrani, announced on Thursday that she was leaving for the south of the country to prepare for an evacuation attempt from Mariupol.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, visiting kyiv on Thursday, assured his side that the organization was “doingeverything possibleto evacuate the civilians trapped inthe apocalypseof Mariupol, which had half a million people before the Russian invasion launched at the end of February.