President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday, March 12, said that all approved humanitarian corridors had worked and almost 13,000 people had been evacuated.
“All the humanitarian corridors that were agreed upon have worked. Managed to take out today 12 729 people. The humanitarian cargo for Mariupol should be tomorrow afternoon,” the Ukrainian leader said in a video message published on his Telegram channel.
He also clarified that due to the complexity of the route, the convoy had to spend the night in Berdyansk.
Earlier in the day, Colonel-General Mikhail Mizintsev, head of the National Center for Defense Control of the Russian Federation, said that a “difficult humanitarian situation” had developed in Mariupol. The nationalists not only did not stop firing in the city, but, on the contrary, increased its intensity in the direction of humanitarian corridors.
In addition, the nationalists thwarted an attempt to evacuate Ukrainian and foreign citizens from the city, organized by the Metropolitan of Zaporozhye and Melitopol Luka, agreed with the commanders of the territorial defense battalions. A column of 50 buses was fired upon, the Russian Defense Ministry noted.
As a representative of the Russian military department pointed out, only individual residents in cars manage to escape from the blockaded settlements. According to him, all attempts by the Russian side, through the Ukrainian authorities, to force the militants in Mariupol to let the convoy of buses through to evacuate the civilian population failed. Moreover, Mizintsev drew attention, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) received the strictest instructions around the clock to identify all telephone calls wishing to evacuate and to detain and arrest such people.
On March 12, the DPR territorial defense headquarters reported that over the past 24 hours, 217 people, including 25 children, had been evacuated from Mariupol and its suburbs to the settlement of Bezymennoye. In total, for the period from March 5 to March 12, 708 people were evacuated to Bezymennoe.
As the residents of Mariupol, who managed to leave the city, said, the fighters of the Ukrainian national battalions deliberately occupy residential areas and fire from there. In particular, according to one local resident, the nationalists occupied positions right in the maternity hospital, where a provocation with an alleged air strike had been staged a few days earlier.
On February 17, the situation in Donbass escalated significantly. The Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics turned to the Russian Federation for help. On February 21, the President of Russia signed a decree recognizing the independence of the DNR and LNR.
Russia launched an operation to protect the civilian population of Donbass on February 24 against the backdrop of escalation in the region due to shelling by the Ukrainian military. As Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov clarified at the time, the goals of the special operation are also the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine. According to him, both of these aspects pose a threat to the Russian state and people.
For more up-to-date videos and details about the situation in Donbass, watch the Izvestia TV channel.