Stark tales of despair as evacuees reach safety
PEOPLE fleeing besieged Mariupol have described weeks of bombardments and deprivations as they arrived in Ukrainianheld territory.
It comes as relief workers await the first group of civilians freed from a steel plant that is the last redoubt of Ukrainian fighters in the devastated port city.
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.
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 Ukrainian-held territory if they wanted to.
While official evacuations have often faltered, many people have managed to flee Mariupol under their own steam in recent weeks. Others are unable to escape.
“People without cars cannot leave. They’re desperate,” said Olena Gibert, who was among those arriving at a UN-backed 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 Russiancontrolled 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.
They have suffered intense bombardment, including a Russian air strike on a maternity hospital and the bombing of a theatre.
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. She said she could see the steel plant from her window, when she dared to look out.
“We could see the rockets flying” and clouds of smoke over the plant, she said.
It was unclear whether there would be further evacuation attempts.
Before the weekend evacuation, about 1,000 civilians were also believed to be in the sprawling, Soviet-era steel plant, along with an estimated 2,000 Ukrainian fighters.
As many as 100,000 people may still be in Mariupol overall.
The city, which had a pre-war population of more than 400,000, is a key Russian target because its capture would deprive Ukraine of a vital port, allow Moscow to establish a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014, and free up troops for fighting elsewhere in the Donbas, now Russia’s main focus.
In his nightly address on Sunday, Mr Zelensky accused Moscow of waging “a war of extermination”, saying Russian shelling had hit food, grain and fertiliser warehouses, and residential neighbourhoods in the city of Kharkiv, in the Donbas and other regions.
The Russian Defence Ministry said its forces struck dozens of military targets in eastern Ukraine in the past 24 hours, including concentrations of troops and weapons and an ammunition depot near Chervone in the Zaporizhzhia region.
A full picture of the battle unfolding in eastern Ukraine is hard to capture.
Western officials say Russia is advancing slowly in its eastern offensive and has captured some villages, but is inflicting heavy civilian casualties through indiscriminate bombing.
Ukrainian forces are fighting their offensive village-by-village while civilians flee air strikes and artillery shelling.
The Ministry of Defence in Britain said yesterday that it believes more than a quarter of all the fighting units Russia has deployed in Ukraine are now “combat ineffective” – unable to fight because of loss of troops or equipment.
The British military believes Russia has committed more than 120 socalled “battalion tactical groups” into the war since February, which represents 65% of all of Moscow’s combat strength.
Ukraine’s military claimed yesterday to have destroyed two small Russian patrol boats in the Black Sea.