After weeks of siege on the steel plant in the city of Mariupol in which hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians were fortified last night (Sunday), the first evacuation of civilians was carried out with the intervention of UN Secretary-General Guterres.
At first, Putin refused to allow fortifications to leave the area, calling for the troops and civilians to be dried up until surrender: “Let no fly come out of there,” Putin ordered Russian Defense Minister Vigo.
Now, one in a hundred civilians evacuated from the plant to Ukrainian-controlled territory tells CNN about the situation at the plant, which has become a huge bunker.
“At first I tried to escape from the city,” she said. “But then shelling began on the humanitarian corridors and it was just too dangerous to get out of town.”
She added that after realizing she could not escape the city, she looked for a hiding place and came to the steel plant built as a kind of maze of bunkers, which also led to the Russian decision to lay siege around the plant and not break into it “it’s too dangerous” said in Russia.
She later told a CNN reporter in Ukrainian civilian excitement that she refused to identify herself: “When I was on the rescue bus I said to my husband: Is this it? The two months of darkness are over? Shouldn’t a flashlight be used for everything?”
She went on to say that “we could not even go to the bathroom and had to find other solutions. For more than two months I did not see the sunlight.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zalansky responded to the rescue, saying that “we have finally managed to free civilians from the Azobestel factory after many weeks of negotiations. There was not a single day that we did not try to find a solution to keep our people safe.”
At the same time, Ukraine is still trying to put pressure on the rest of the civilians and soldiers trapped inside the large steel plant.