The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Mariupol evacuated as Russians target Odesa
Rocket strikes were yesterday said to have hit the city of Odesa as Russian forces focused efforts on the strategically important Black Sea port in the southwest of Ukraine.
The city’s governor, Maksym Marchenko, said on the Telegram messaging app that there were reports of deaths and injuries.
It comes as relief workers await the first group of civilians freed from a Mariupol steel plant that is the last redoubt of Ukrainian fighters in the devastated port city.
A video posted online on Sunday by Ukrainian forces showed elderly women and mothers with small children climbing over a steep pile of rubble from the sprawling Azovstal steel plant and eventually boarding a bus.
More than 100 civilians from the plant were expected to arrive yesterday in Zaporizhzhia, about 140 miles north-west of Mariupol, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said.
The evacuation, if successful, would represent rare progress in easing the human cost of the almost 10-week war, which has caused particular suffering in Mariupol.
Previous attempts to open safe corridors out of the city on the Sea of Azov and other places have broken down.
People fleeing Russian-occupied areas in the past have said their vehicles were fired on, and Ukrainian officials have repeatedly accused Russian forces of shelling agreedupon evacuation routes.
“Today, for the first time in all the days of the war, this vitally needed green corridor has started working,” Mr Zelensky said on Sunday in a pre-recorded address published on his Telegram messaging channel.
At least some of the people evacuated from the plant were apparently taken to a village controlled by Moscow-backed separatists, though Russian state media reported they would be allowed to continue on to Ukrainianheld territory if they wanted to.
In the past, Ukrainian officials have accused Moscow’s troops of forcibly relocating civilians from areas they have captured to Russia. Moscow has claimed the people wanted to go.
While official evacuations have often faltered, many people have managed to flee Mariupol under their own steam in recent weeks, but others are still unable to escape.
“People without cars cannot leave. They’re desperate,” said Olena Gibert, who was among those arriving at a Unbacked reception centre in Zaporizhzhia in dusty and often damaged private cars. “You need to go get them. “People have nothing. We had nothing.”
She said many people still in Mariupol wish to escape the Russian-controlled city but cannot say so openly amid the atmosphere of constant pro-russian propaganda.
A siege of the city since the early days of the war has trapped civilians in terrible conditions, with scarce access to food, water, medicine and electricity.
Anastasiia Dembytska, who took advantage of the brief ceasefire around the evacuation of civilians from the steel plant to leave with her daughter, nephew and dog, said her family survived by cooking on a makeshift stove and drinking well water.
“We could see the rockets flying and clouds of smoke over the plant,” she said.