9:01 a.m.: First evacuation of civilians from the Azovstal factory in Mariupol
Hope is reborn a little in Mariupol. A first group of civilians was extracted overnight from Saturday to Sunday from the Azovstal steelworks, the last pocket of Ukrainian resistance in the city. Above all, the exit of twenty civilians from the underground of this immense industrial complex represents a great first, all previous evacuation attempts having failed.
The Azov regiment, which defends this industrial zone, spoke of “twenty civilians, women and children”. “They have been transferred to an agreed place and we hope that they will be evacuated to Zaporizhia, in the territory controlled by Ukraine,” said Sviatoslav Palamar, deputy commander of the regiment in a video on Telegram.
A few hours earlier, the official Russian agency Tass had announced that a group of 25 civilians, including six children, had been able to get out of Azovstal, where according to kyiv hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians are buried in underground galleries dating from the Soviet era.