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 the civilians”, also advanced Sviatoslav Palamar.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky referred to it in his video address on Saturday evening, saying: “We are doing everything to ensure that the evacuation mission from Mariupol is carried out.”
According to new satellite images from Maxar Technologies taken on April 29, almost all buildings in Azovstal have been destroyed.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, visiting kyiv on Thursday, assured his side that the organization was doing “everything possible” to evacuate civilians stuck in the “apocalypse” of Mariupol, which had a half -million people before the Russian invasion launched at the end of February.
The total capture of this city would allow Moscow to connect the territories conquered in the south, in particular the Crimean peninsula annexed in 2014, to the pro-Russian separatist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, in the east.
– “Chessboard” –
It is precisely on this eastern flank that the Russian army, numerically superior to its Ukrainian adversary and better endowed with artillery, is nibbling away at ground, seeking to hold it in a vice from the north and the south in order to complete its hold on the Donbass.
This is the “second phase” of the “special military operation” launched on February 24 by Russian President Vladimir Putin, after the withdrawal of Russian forces from northern Ukraine and the kyiv region, put in failure.
“It’s not like in 2014, there is not a defined front along an axis”, explains Iryna Rybakova, press officer of the 93rd brigade of the Ukrainian forces, in reference to the war which opposed Kyiv to pro-Russian separatists in this region eight years ago and has never fully ceased.
“It’s a village of their own, a village of ours: you have to visualize a chessboard instead”, continues the soldier. And after two weeks of Russian assault, “we are currently unable to push back the enemy”.
President Zelensky warned on Saturday that the Russians “have formed reinforcements in the Kharkiv region, trying to increase the pressure in Donbass”.
At the same time, a senior Ukrainian military official said on Saturday evening that he informed US Army Chief of Staff Mark A. Milley of “the difficult situation in the east of our country, particularly in the regions of Izium and of Sieverodonetsk, where the enemy has concentrated most of its efforts and its most combat-ready troops”, two towns located roughly in the Kharkiv-Lugansk axis.
“Despite the complexity of the situation, we are providing defense, maintaining the front lines and the occupied positions,” General Valery Zalouzhny said on the Facebook page of the Ukrainian military staff.
The northeastern districts of Kharkiv, the country’s second city with nearly 1.5 million inhabitants before the war, are hit daily by Russian rockets, causing the death of civilians.
But the situation is sometimes changing: Rouska Lozova, a village of a few thousand inhabitants, located about twenty kilometers from this metropolis, was taken over on Friday by Ukrainian forces after two months under Russian occupation.
“We stayed in the basement without food for two months, we ate what we had,” a 40-year-old resident told AFP, his eyes red with fatigue.
On the armament side, in the middle of the great hilly plains and industrial cities, the face to face is essentially done with artillery, “Goddess of war” according to the expression consecrated by Stalin.
– Johnson wants to “strengthen Ukraine” –
But the balance of power remains extremely favorable to the Russians, up to “five times superior in terms of equipment” according to Iryna Terehovytch, sergeant of the 123rd Ukrainian brigade.
Western support therefore represents a considerable stake, with the United States at the forefront: their president Joe Biden asked Congress this week for a colossal budget extension of 33 billion dollars mainly to deliver more military aid to kyiv.
London too is showing its aid.”I spoke with President Zelensky to outline how the UK will continue to provide military and humanitarian aid to give Ukrainians the equipment they need to defend themselves. I am more determined than ever to strengthen Ukraine and make Putin fail,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted on Saturday evening.
A little earlier, Emmanuel Macron had told his Ukrainian counterpart on the phone that France was going to “reinforce” its shipments of military equipment to Ukraine – in particular long-range guns – to “restore its sovereignty and territorial integrity”. .
The French president also said that “the mission of French experts contributing to the collection of evidence to (…) allow the work of international justice relating to crimes committed in the context of Russian aggression” would continue.
This followed the announcement on Saturday by the kyiv region police of the discovery the day before of three bodies in a mass grave in Myrotske, a village near Boutcha, a small town that has become the symbol of the atrocities attributed to Russia.
The three men “had their hands tied, clothing around their faces so they couldn’t see anything and some had gags in their mouths”, according to the description given by local police.
Mr. Zelensky had put the number of bodies discovered in the Boutcha area at 900 on Friday, and the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office has already announced the indictment of ten Russian soldiers and the identification of more than 8,000 war crimes in Ukraine.
Antonio Guterres, who visited Boutcha on Thursday, urged Moscow to cooperate with the International Criminal Court investigation. But Moscow denied any responsibility and spoke of a “staged”. The Russian army also struck kyiv while the UN chief was there, killing a journalist and triggering a chorus of international protests.