New Red Cross bid to evacuate siege city

ABOUT 170,000 people trapped in the besieged city of Mariupol are fast running out of food, water and medicines.

Red Cross teams will start another evacuation attempt today after Ukrainian and Russian negotiators agreed a plan during yesterday’s peace talks in Istanbul.

The south-eastern port city has been under Russian attack for five weeks, but Ukrainian officials were hoping that a ceasefire would take place for the planned evacuation.

On Friday, the International Committee of the Red Cross said its teams were forced to turn around as the city remained too unsafe.

It said: ‘The conditions civilians are facing in Mariupol are becoming increasingly dire. Our team in Mariupol describes the situation in the city as apocalyptic.

‘People are living with no food, no water, no heat, no electricity. They need urgent respite.’

Yesterday Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said an agreement plan had been reached.

He said: ‘Today or tomorrow we will hear good news regarding the evacuation of the inhabitants of Mariupol.’

Last night the humanitarian group said a team with three vehicles and nine Red Cross staff members had started the journey to Mariupol to begin another evacuation attempt.

Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Iryna Vereshchuk said that 765 Mariupol residents had reached Zaporizhzhia, about 140 miles to the north-west, in private vehicles yesterday. The city has been the scene of some of the war’s worst attacks, including on a maternity hospital and a theatre where civilians were sheltering.

Mariupol, on the coast of the Sea of Azov, had a pre-war population of about 430,000.

Some 5,000 people are thought to have been killed and 80 per cent of its buildings have been reduced to rubble.

If the city falls, it would give Russia control of one of Ukraine’s biggest ports. It would also create a land corridor between Crimea and areas in Luhansk and Donetsk held by Russian-backed separatists.

But its resistance has also has taken on symbolic significance during Russia’s invasion, said Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Ukrainian think tank Penta.

‘Mariupol has become a symbol of Ukrainian resistance, and without its conquest, Putin cannot sit down at the negotiating table,’ Mr Fesenko said.