DOZENS OF CIVILIANS RESCUED FROM UKRAINIAN STEEL PLANT
Evacuation efforts continue as fighters vow to defend city
ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine
Dozens more civilians were rescued Friday from the tunnels under the besieged steel mill where Ukrainian fighters in Mariupol have been making their last stand to prevent Moscow’s complete takeover of the strategically important port city.
Russian and Ukrainian officials said 50 people were evacuated from the Azovstal plant and handed over to representatives of the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross. The Russian military said the group included 11 children.
Russian officials and Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said evacuation efforts would continue today. The latest evacuees were in addition to roughly 500 other civilians who got out of the plant and city in recent days.
The fight for the last Ukrainian stronghold in a city reduced to ruins by the Russian onslaught appeared increasingly desperate amid growing speculation that President Vladimir Putin wants to finish the battle for Mariupol so he can present a triumph to the Russian people in time for Monday’s Victory Day, the biggest patriotic holiday on the Russian calendar.
As the holiday commemorating the Soviet Union’s World War II victory over Nazi Germany approached, cities across Ukraine prepared for an increase in Russian attacks, and officials urged residents to heed air raid warnings.
“These symbolic dates are to the Russian aggressor like red to a bull,” said Ukraine’s first deputy interior minister, Yevhen Yenin. “While the entire civilized world remembers the victims of terrible wars on these days, the Russian Federation wants parades and is preparing to dance over bones in Mariupol.”
By Russia’s most recent estimate, roughly 2,000 Ukrainian fighters are holed up in the vast maze of tunnels and bunkers beneath the Azovstal steelworks, and they have repeatedly refused to surrender. Ukrainian officials said before Friday’s evacuations that a few hundred civilians were also trapped there, and fears for their safety have increased as the battle has grown fiercer in recent days.
Kateryna Prokopenko, whose husband, Denys Prokopenko, commands the Azov Regiment troops inside the plant, issued a desperate plea to also spare the fighters. She said they would be willing to go to a third country to wait out the war but would never surrender to Russia because that would mean “filtration camps, prison, torture and death.”
If nothing is done to save her husband and his men, they will “stand to the end without surrender,” she said Friday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said “influential states” are involved in efforts to rescue the soldiers.
“We are also working on diplomatic options to save our troops who are still at Azovstal,” he said in his nightly video address.
U.N. officials have been tight-lipped about the civilian evacuation efforts, but it seemed likely that the latest evacuees would be taken to Zaporizhzhia, a Ukrainiancontrolled city about 140 miles northwest of Mariupol where others who escaped the port city were brought.