Negotiations between Russia and Ukraine are currently focused on the evacuation of 60 people from the Azovstal Steelworks in Mariupol, the seriously injured and doctors. This was stated by Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk, quoted by the Kyiv Independent.
Russia does not accept full evacuation, the deputy prime minister added. According to the newspaper, about a thousand Ukrainian soldiers remain at the steel plant.
Vereshchuk previously said evacuation negotiations were underway with Turkish mediation.
On May 11, the Deputy Prime Minister announced that the Ukrainian side had offered the Russians to exchange the badly wounded soldiers left at the steel mill for captured Russian soldiers.
The Ukrainian government’s goal remains to get all Ukrainian soldiers safely out of the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, but the path to an agreement must be “sober and pragmatic” and “the result must not please everyone”. This was stated by Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk, quoted by the Ukrainian agency Interfax. The deputy prime minister stressed that the facility housed not only militiamen of the Azov regiment, but also members of other branches of the armed forces and police.
In his latest video, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke of “very complex” talks with Russia to get the last defenders out of the Azovstal plant in Mariupol, adding that Kyiv was using “influential intermediaries”. “Russian forces are constantly bombing the steelworks in the southern port of Mariupol, the last bastion of hundreds of Ukrainian defenders in a city almost completely controlled by Russia after more than two months of siege,” says Zelenskyy. Many negotiations are currently underway. Complex about the next phase of the evacuation mission: the removal of the seriously injured doctors. We are talking about a large number of people. And we are also doing everything we can to evacuate everyone else, all of our defenders. We have already participated, anyone in the world could be the most influential mediator,” says the Ukrainian president, without giving details.
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