Civilians evacuated from Mariupol as Pelosi visits Kyiv
UN confirms ‘safe passage’ operation under way from besieged port city
KYIV/BEZIMENNE, Ukraine (Reuters) – Around 100 Ukrainian civilians were being evacuated from a ruined steelworks in the city of Mariupol on Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said, after the United Nations had confirmed a “safe-passage operation” was in progress there.
Mariupol, a strategic port city on the Azov Sea, has endured the most destructive siege of the war. Pope Francis, in an implicit criticism of Russia on Sunday, told thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square the city had been “barbarously bombarded.”
Zelensky tweeted: “Grateful to our team! Now they, together with [the UN], are working on the evacuation of other civilians from the plant.” The evacuees would reach the Ukrainian-controlled city of Zaporizhzhia on Monday, he said.
With fighting stretching along a broad front in southern and eastern Ukraine, US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pledged continued US support for Ukraine when she met Zelensky during an unannounced visit to Kyiv.
Russia, meanwhile, said it had destroyed a stock of Western-supplied weapons at an airfield near Odesa in southern Ukraine.
Moscow has turned its focus to Ukraine’s south and east after failing to capture Kyiv in the early weeks of a war that has flattened cities, killed thousands of civilians and forced more than five million people to flee the country.
Russia declared victory in Mariupol on April 21, even as hundreds of holdout Ukrainian troops and civilians took shelter in the city’s Azovstal Iron and Steel Works,
a vast Soviet-era complex with a network of bunkers and tunnels in which they have been trapped with little food, water or medicine.
Negotiations to evacuate the civilians had repeatedly broken down in recent weeks, with Russia and Ukraine blaming each other.
But on Sunday, more than 50 civilians arrived at a temporary accommodation center after escaping from Mariupol, a Reuters photographer said.
The civilians arrived on buses at the Russian-held village of Bezimenne, around 30 km. east of Mariupol, where a row of light-blue tents had been set up, in a convoy with UN and Russian military vehicles.
A “safe-passage operation” had started on Saturday and was being coordinated with the International Committee
of the Red Cross, Russia and Ukraine, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.
No further details could be released so as not to jeopardize the safety of evacuees and the convoy, it said.
Footage posted by Zelensky on Twitter on Sunday showed him, flanked by an armed escort and dressed in military fatigues, greeting a US congressional delegation led by Pelosi outside his presidential office the previous day.
“Our delegation traveled to Kyiv to send an unmistakable and resounding message to the entire world: America stands firmly with Ukraine,” Pelosi, the highest-ranking US official to visit Ukraine since Russia invaded on February 24, said in a statement.
Moscow calls its actions a “special military 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.
“We spoke about what happened, and I certainly went into the process without illusions, saying that this is the beginning of a process, and it will be evaluated based upon action,” Herzog said about his conversations with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “It is like developing a relationship. I do not know what will happen, but I know that there is a genuine Turkish effort to improve relations with Israel, and I am giving it a chance.”