While kyiv claims to have destroyed two Russian patrol boats, this is the first coordinated evacuation.
Ukrainian civilians are dribbling out of the hell of Mariupol. Over the weekend, a hundred people were able to leave the huge Azovstal steelworks, the last pocket of resistance in this strategic port in southern Donbass almost entirely under Russian control. This is the first evacuation, in two months of siege, carried out in coordination between kyiv, Moscow and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
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“For the first time, this vital humanitarian corridor has started to function”, rejoiced the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky. According to the Russian army, 57 people left for the north, towards territories occupied by Moscow, and 69 towards areas controlled by the Ukrainians. But hundreds of civilians remain stuck in Azovstal alongside the last Ukrainian fighters. On Monday, buses were expected in Mariupol at the assembly point to take other civilians to Zaporijjia, a town transformed into a reception point for refugees, some 200 km to the northwest, and still under Ukrainian control, even if the line head on comes close.
In the Donbass, in fact, the Russian forces, in numerical superiority and better equipped with heavy armaments, are progressing, but slowly. The Russian army is nibbling away at the ground by seeking to hold its adversary in a stranglehold from the north and the south, in order to complete its hold on the Donbass mining basin. But according to the American Institute for the Study of War (ISW), “Russian forces continued to conduct unsuccessful ground assaults along the Donetsk-Luhansk front line without registering any territorial gains on 1is May”.
“I could be wrong”
For their part, Ukrainian forces carried out an artillery strike on a Russian command post in Izyum, southeast of Kharkiv, on April 30, according to ISW. kyiv also claimed to have destroyed two Russian Raptor-class patrol boats using drones near Serpents’ Island in the Black Sea. “Bayraktar works”, welcomed on Facebook the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, Valeri Zalounjy, in a message accompanied by a video where we see two boats hit by two separate missiles. Moscow did not confirm the information. Raptor patrol boats are among the fastest shuttles in the Russian Navy, capable of reaching nearly 90 km/h at full speed, and carrying up to 20 soldiers in addition to the crew.
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In mid-April, Ukrainian forces had already sunk the Russian flagship Moscow. On the diplomatic front, while Finland canceled a contract with the Russian group Rosatom for the construction of a nuclear reactor in the north of the country, Israel, through the voice of Yair Lapid, its foreign minister, castigated the About Sergei Lavrov, the head of Russian diplomacy, who had affirmed that Hitler “had Jewish blood”. The Jewish state has summoned the Russian ambassador to Tel Aviv to obtain «clarifications». “Zelensky makes this argument: how can Nazism be present (in Ukraine) if he himself is Jewish. I could be wrong, but Hitler also had Jewish blood.said Sergei Lavrov, whose statement was transcribed on the website of his ministry.
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