Russia keeps up its unrelenting barrage
Moscow admits it has `evacuated' more than one million Ukrainians for their own good
DOBROPILLIA, Ukraine — Russia carried out dozens of missile strikes across southern and eastern Ukraine on Saturday as some women and children were evacuated from a steel plant in the besieged city of Mariupol after being holed up there for nearly two weeks.
Moscow has turned its focus toward Ukraine's south and east after failing to capture the capital Kyiv in a nineweek assault that has flattened cities, killed thousands of civilians and forced more than five million to flee abroad.
Its forces have captured the town of Kherson in the south, giving them a foothold just 100 km north of Russian-annexed Crimea, and have mostly occupied Mariupol, a strategic eastern port city on the Azov Sea.
Russia declared victory in Mariupol on April 21 even as hundreds of Ukrainian troops and civilians took shelter in the Azovstal steel works.
The UN has urged an evacuation deal, and on Saturday, a Ukrainian fighter inside said some 20 women and children had made it out safely.
“We are getting civilians out of the rubble with ropes — so far it's the elderly, women and children,” said the fighter, Sviatoslav Palamar, referring to wreckage within the huge four-square-km plant.
Palamar said both Russia and Ukraine were respecting a local ceasefire, and that he hoped the evacuated civilians would be transferred to the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia to the northwest.
There was no Russian comment on the evacuations. Hundreds of Ukrainians remain inside, according to Ukrainian officials.
To the west in the strategic seaport of Odesa, which has so far been relatively unscathed in the war, a Russian missile strike launched from Crimea destroyed the runway at the main airport, said Maksym Marchenko, Odesda's governor.
Ukraine's military said the airport could no longer be used.
Moscow's assault in the south is aimed in part at linking the area with Crimea as it pushes for complete control over Ukraine's eastern Donbas region.
Parts of Donbas' two provinces, Luhansk and Donetsk, were already controlled by Russian-backed separatists before Moscow's Feb. 24 invasion.
Moscow calls its actions a “special operation” to disarm Ukraine and rid it of anti-Russian nationalism fomented by the West. Ukraine and the West say Russia launched an unprovoked war of aggression.
Despite weeks of peace talks, both sides looked to be as far apart as ever on Saturday.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said lifting Western sanctions on Moscow was part of the negotiations, but senior Ukrainian negotiator Mykhailo Podolyak denied this was the case.
Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, insists sanctions need to be strengthened and cannot be part of negotiations with a “murderous nation.”
Ukraine accuses Russian troops of carrying out atrocities as they withdrew from areas near Kyiv in early April. Moscow denies the claims.
Negotiators last met faceto-face on March 29, and have since spoken only by video link.
The U.S., Canada and their European allies have imposed sweeping sanctions on Russia's economy and provided Ukraine with weapons and humanitarian aid.
U.S. President Joe Biden is seeking a $33-billion aid package for Kyiv, including $20 billion for weapons, and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Saturday his country would continue “to give the Ukrainians the equipment they need to defend themselves.”
Lavrov said that if Washington and its partners in the NATO military alliance truly wanted to resolve the crisis, they should stop sending weapons to Kyiv.
Meanwhile Saturday, Moscow offered the first official figure for the mass transfer of people from occupied cities such as Mariupol, saying more than one million Ukrainians have been moved into Russia since the start of the war.
Lavrov said they were “evacuated” for their own good and given medical assistance, but Kyiv has long claimed that its citizens are being forcibly deported to farflung parts of the country or put in camps to be used as hostages.
Separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine and troops in Russian-occupied areas in the south have organized a stream of buses for residents who have come to see it as the only alternative to staying in the middle of a war zone.
“The refugees are offered medical and psychological help,” Lavrov said, adding that more than 9,500 temporary facilities have been set up across Russia to host the new arrivals.
Earlier this month Ukraine said 800,000 people had been taken to Russia against their will, but that now appears to have been an underestimate.
Temporary facilities in Russian border areas were already overflowing with Ukrainian refugees soon after the start of the war, with people often put on trains to remote regions.
In the town of Dobropillia in Donetsk, the shock wave from a strike on Saturday blew in the windows of an apartment building and left a large crater in the yard.
One resident, who gave only his first name of Andriy, said his partner was in a room facing the yard at the time of the attack and was knocked unconscious.
“Thank God the four children were in the kitchen,” he said, standing in the destroyed living room.