Three days without a humanitarian corridor and civilians entrenched in the underground shelters of the Azovstal metallurgical complex in Mariupol, in the South-East of Ukraine. As the besieged city is on the verge of falling into the hands of the Russian army, kyiv finally announced that an agreement was reached with Moscow on Wednesday to establish an evacuation corridor allowing civilians to flee the city. Women, children and the elderly are affected.
“We managed to find a preliminary agreement (with the Russians) on a humanitarian corridor,” Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said on Telegram. “Given the catastrophic situation in Mariupol, we are focusing our efforts on this direction today,” she also stressed. The humanitarian corridor will be set up at the besieged port of Mariupol and will lead to the city of Zaporizhya. It is therefore the first agreement of this type since Saturday. “At least a thousand civilians, most of them women, children and the elderly, (are entrenched) in the underground shelters” of the factory, according to the city council of the strategic city. In this city, the authorities fear the death of 20,000 to 22,000 civilians.
Another hallway for fighters
For the indomitable Ukrainian soldiers terminated to surrender, the Russians had set up a corridor on Tuesday evening, regretting that no fighter from kyiv had taken it. The latter will be reopened again on Wednesday from 1 p.m. (Paris time), according to the same source. Russia is calling on the city’s last defenders to end their “senseless resistance”, promising “life will be saved” to entrenched Ukrainian fighters if they surrender. But the latter implore on their side “the leaders of the world” to organize an extraction.
A total of 300,000 Ukrainians have been evacuated through humanitarian corridors since the start of the war on February 24, according to a figure released Tuesday evening by the Ukrainian Ministry of Reintegration. “Since the start of the war, the Ukrainian government has offered more than 340 humanitarian corridors. The (Russian) occupants accepted about 300 of them and de facto 176 really worked”, specified the ministry which accuses the Russians of having violated the ceasefire or blocked the evacuation buses on several occasions, which rejects Moscow.