Update on the evacuation of around twenty civilians 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 Mariupol, in eastern Ukraine, a region where the Russian army concentrates most of his strengths. The exit of twenty civilians from the underground of this huge industrial complex represents a great first, all previous evacuation attempts having failed, in this port city in the south-east almost completely destroyed after weeks of siege.
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.
“The Azov regiment continues to clear the rubble to get civilians out. We hope that this process will continue and that we will succeed in evacuating all civilians.”, also advanced Sviatoslav Palamar. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky referred to this in his Saturday evening video address, saying: “We are doing everything to ensure that the Mariupol evacuation mission is carried out”.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, visiting kyiv on Thursday, assured his side that the organization was doing “everything possible” to evacuate civilians trapped in ” the apocalypse ” of Mariupol, which had half a million people before the Russian invasion launched at the end of February.
The total capture of this city would allow Moscow to make the connection between the territories conquered in the South, in particular the Crimean peninsula annexed in 2014, to the pro-Russian separatist republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, in the East.