UN convoy expected in Mariupol despite uncertain context
A new United Nations (UN) convoy is expected on Friday to evacuate the last civilians entrenched in the Azovstal steelworks, in Mariupol, the last pocket of Ukrainian resistance in this strategic port of Donbass, without however assurance of a truce in the fighting.
Despite the uncertainty regarding the truce in the fighting in Mariupol, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Martin Griffiths, announced on Thursday that a new convoy was heading for the martyr city, which has become one of the symbols of the Russian invasion began on February 24, in order to carry out an evacuation operation of the civilians stranded in the Azovstal factory.
“As we speak, a convoy is on its way to arrive in Azovstal by tomorrow morning with the hope of recovering the remaining civilians from this dark hell they have inhabited for so many weeks and months, and bring them back to safety”, Mr. Griffiths said in Warsaw. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has confirmed that it is associated with it.
A hundred civilians had already been able to leave this complex last weekend, during an evacuation organized with the UN and the ICRC.
Information on the situation in the Mariupol steelworks, where civilians and combatants live entrenched in huge underground galleries, nevertheless remained contradictory. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his daily video message late Thursday that Russian forces were still pounding the steel plant despite Russia’s promise of a three-day truce that began Thursday morning.
Russian bombardments continue to rage “while civilians still have to be evacuated, women, children”he said. “Imagine this hell! And there are children! More than two months of non-stop bombardments, death constantly close”he added.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday evening that “the Russian army was always ready to ensure the evacuation of civilians” of the Azovstal plant, who could still number two hundred, trapped with the Ukrainian fighters in this complex.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov assured that the Russian army respects the ceasefire around the plant and that humanitarian corridors around Azovstal “worked” ; what the Ukrainian fighters on the spot have denied. The deputy commander of the Azov regiment, which defends these installations, Sviatoslav Palamar, assured in a video that “bloody battles” were taking place inside the site itself and that the Russians “did not keep their promise” truce.