The deputy commander of the Azov regiment defending the site hopes that these women and children “will be evacuated to Zaporiya on Ukrainian-controlled territory.”
Twenty civilians left the Azovstal factory in Mariupol, a Russian-besieged port in southeastern Ukraine, on Saturday to be evacuated to Zaporijjia, the Azov regiment defending the site said.
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“Twenty civilians, women and children (…) were taken to an agreed place and we hope that they will be evacuated to Zaporizhia in the territory controlled by Ukraine,” explained Sviatoslav Palamar, deputy commander of the Azov regiment in a videos on Telegram. A few hours earlier, the official Russian agency Tass announced that a group of 25 civilians, including six children, escaped from Azovstal, a huge steel plant blocking hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians. No attempt to evacuate Azovstal has been successful so far.
“Enemy artillery shelled the area all night. The ceasefire, which was supposed to begin at 6:00 a.m. (3:00 GMT), did not begin until 11:00 a.m. Both parties respect it. The evacuation convoy, which we expected at 6:00 a.m., only arrived at 6:25 p.m.,” says Sviatoslav Palamar. “The Azov regiment continues to clean up the rubble to get civilians out. We hope that this process will continue and that we will manage to evacuate all civilians,” he added.
Hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, including dozens of children, are stranded at the Azovstal site, according to Kyiv, with the last Ukrainian fighters in the city almost completely destroyed and controlled by Russian forces after weeks of a siege. The Ukrainian Council Presidency had announced the previous day that the evacuation of the civilians holed up in the Azovstal factory was “scheduled” for Friday. The UN coordinator in Ukraine, Osnat Lubrani, announced on Thursday that she was going to the south of the country to prepare an evacuation attempt from Mariupol.
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 Mariupol “apocalypse,” which killed half a million people before Russia’s Invasion started at the end of February.