New Mariupol evac has begun: Ukraine
Russia says it has destroyed a large ammunition depot in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk in a missile strike
KYIV: Ukraine said a new attempt had begun on Friday to evacuate scores of civilians trapped in a ruined steel works in the city of Mariupol, after bloody fighting with Russian forces thwarted efforts to bring them to safety the previous day.
Mariupol, a strategic southern port on the Azov Sea, has endured the most destructive siege of the 10-week-old war and the sprawling Soviet-era Azovstal steel plant is the last part of the city still in the hands of holdout Ukrainian fighters.
UN-brokered evacuations of some of the hundreds of civilians who had taken shelter in the plant’s network of tunnels and bunkers began last weekend, but were halted in recent days by renewed fighting.
“The next stage of rescuing our people from Azovstal is under way at the moment. Information about the results will be provided later,” said Andriy Yermak, head of the Ukrainian presidential staff. He gave no more details.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s general staff said on Friday that Russian forces were continuing their “attempts to fully take over the Donetsk and Luhansk regions”, areas in the east partially seized by Moscow-backed separatists in 2014.
Russia’s defence ministry said it had destroyed a large ammunition depot in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk in a missile strike. It also said its air defences shot down two Ukrainian warplanes in the Luhansk region.
Victory Day in Mariupol?
Putin declared victory in Mariupol on April 21 and ordered his forces to seal off the plant.
Ukrainian officials have said Russia might step up its offensive before May 9, when Moscow commemorates the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two.
“The time will come to mark Victory Day in Mariupol,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters in a briefing on Friday, when asked about plans for May 9 in territory recently seized by Russianbacked forces.
Hospitals devastated
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Thursday that nearly 400 hospitals and other medical facilities in the country had been destroyed or damaged since the invasion.
“This amounts to a complete lack of medication for cancer patients. It means extreme difficulties or a complete lack of insulin for diabetes,” Zelensky said in a video address to a medical charity group. “It is impossible to carry out surgery. It even means, quite simply, a lack of antibiotics.”
7 howitzers for Ukraine
Germany will deliver seven selfpropelled howitzers to Ukraine, defence minister Christine Lambrecht said on Friday, in a further reversal of a longtime policy not to send heavy weapons to war zones due to the country’s Nazi past. The howitzer delivery, on top of five such artillery systems the Netherlands had already pledged, was another sign of Berlin heeding pressure at home and abroad for it to help Ukraine fend off a Russian invasion.
Grains stuck in Ukraine
Nearly 25 million tonnes of grains are stuck in Ukraine and unable to leave the country due to infrastructure challenges and blocked Black Sea ports including Mariupol, a UN food agency official said on Friday.
The blockages are seen as a factor behind high food prices which hit a record high in March in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, before easing slightly in April, the FAO said on Friday. “It’s an almost grotesque situation we see at the moment in Ukraine with nearly 25 mln tonnes of grain that could be exported but that cannot leave the country simply because of lack of infrastructure, the blockade of the ports,” Josef Schmidhuber, FAO deputy director, Markets and Trade Division said.