Another evacuation from Mariupol is under way
ALONG-AWAITED effort to evacuate people from a steel plant in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol was under way yesterday, the United Nations said.
UN humanitarian spokesman Saviano Abreu told the Associated Press that the operation to bring people out of the sprawling Azovstal steel plant was being done with the International Committee for the Red Cross and in co-ordination with Ukrainian and Russian officials.
As many as 100,000 people are believed to be in blockaded Mariupol, including up to 1,000 civilians who were seeking cover with an estimated 2,000 Ukrainian fighters beneath the Soviet-era steel plant – the only part of the city not occupied by the Russians.
Mr Abreu called the situation “very complex” and would not give further details.
Like other evacuations, success of the mission in Mariupol depended on Russia and its forces in a long series of checkpoints before reaching Ukrainian ones. Zaporizhzhia, a city 141 miles north-west of Mariupol, was the expected destination of the evacuation effort.
Zaporizhzhia was the destination of Mariupol residents who managed to flee the city on their own when previous Red Cross and Ukrainianorganised evacuations had to be called off due to ongoing shelling or concerns about route safety.
The UN said the convoy to evacuate civilians started on Friday, travelling some 140 miles before reaching the plant in Mariupol on Saturday morning.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said yesterday afternoon that the first group of about 100 people was heading for Ukrainian-controlled territory. “Tomorrow we’ll meet them in Zaporizhzhia. Grateful to our team! Now they, together with the UN, are working on the evacuation of other civilians from the plant,” he wrote on Twitter.
Yesterday, a team from Doctors Without Borders was at a reception centre for displaced people in Zaporizhzhia in preparation for the UN convoy’s arrival, if successful. Stress, exhaustion and low supplies of food have probably weakened the health of civilians who have been trapped underground at the steel plant.
People who have fled Russianoccupied areas have at times described their vehicles being fired on. Ukrainian officials have repeatedly accused Russian forces of shelling evacuation routes on which the two sides had agreed.
Russia’s high-stakes offensive in coastal southern Ukraine and the country’s eastern industrial heartland has seen Ukrainian forces fighting village by village, and more civilians fleeing airstrikes and artillery shelling as war draws near their doorsteps.
Russian forces have embarked on a major military operation to seize significant parts of southern and eastern Ukraine following their failure to capture Kyiv.
Mariupol, a port city on the Sea of Azov, is a key target because of its strategic location near the Crimea peninsula, which Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014.
“All the leaders of the free world know what Russia has done to Mariupol. Russia will not go unpunished for this,” Mr Zelensky said on Saturday. He warned that Russia was “gathering additional forces for new attacks against our military in the east of the country”.