Those fleeing a siege arrived Monday in Ukrainian-controlled territory, residents of Mariupol described weeks of bombing and deprivation. Officials and rescue workers awaited the first group of people evacuated from a steel mill, the final stronghold of Ukrainian fighters in the ruined port city.
Elderly women and moms with little children were shown crawling over a steep pile of rubble from the massive Azovstal steel complex and eventually boarding a bus in a video released by Ukrainian soldiers on Sunday.
According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, more than 100 citizens from the factory were scheduled to arrive in Zaporizhzhia, around 140 miles (230 kilometers) northwest of Mariupol, on Monday.
“This crucially needed green corridor has started working today, for the first time in all the days of the battle,” Zelensky said in a video message on Sunday.
If successful, the evacuation would be a rare step forward in reducing the human toll of the nearly 10-week conflict, which has wreaked havoc in Mariupol. Attempts to open safe passages out of the city of Sea of Azov and other locations have failed in the past, with Ukrainian officials accusing Russian forces of shooting and shelling along agreed-upon evacuation routes.
On Monday, Zelensky expressed the expectation that more people will be able to leave Mariupol in a coordinated evacuation. The city council directed citizens who wanted to leave to congregate at a shopping mall, despite the fact that buses to carry them out of town had yet to arrive. When official evacuations have failed in the past, some people have managed to flee on their own, while others have remained trapped.
“Those without automobiles are unable to go.” “They’re desperate,” said Olena Gibert, who was among hundreds arriving in dusty and often damaged private cars at a United Nations-backed receiving center in Zaporizhzhia. “You should go collect them.” “No one has anything.”
She claims that many individuals still in Mariupol want to leave the Russian-controlled city but are unable to express their desire openly because of the continual pro-Russian propaganda.
Anastasiia Dembytska, who left with her daughter, nephew, and dog during the brief cease-fire surrounding the evacuation of civilians from the steel mill, told reporters that her family survived by cooking on a makeshift stove and using well water.
When she dared to look out her window, she claimed she could see the steel plant.
She said, “We could see the rockets soaring” and clouds of smoke rising from the factory.
On Sunday, at least some of the people evacuated from the factory were reportedly moved to a settlement controlled by separatists backed by Moscow. Some chose to remain in separatist territories, while dozens fled to Ukrainian-controlled territory, according to the Russian military. It was not possible to independently verify the information.
Ukrainian officials have previously accused Russian troops of forcibly moving citizens from places they have taken over to Russia; Moscow has claimed that the inhabitants desired to relocate to Russia.
The surviving residents at the Mariupol steel factory, according to Zelensky, are terrified to board buses because they believe they will be taken to Russia. He claimed that the UN had informed him that they would be allowed to go to areas controlled by Ukraine.
Mariupol has become a symbol of the war’s human suffering. As Moscow’s soldiers pummeled the city to rubble in the face of harder than expected Ukrainian resistance, people have been besieged with limited access to food, water, or electricity.
Ukrainian forces, backed by Western weapons, blocked Moscow’s attempt to take Kyiv in the early weeks of the war, denied Russia complete control of the sky, and even hit Russia at sea last month, sinking the flagship of its Black Sea fleet.
Ukraine’s military reported Monday that two small Russian patrol boats had been destroyed in the Black Sea. Drone footage shared online shows two Russian Raptor boats exploding after being hit by missiles, according to the Ukrainians. This could not be independently verified by reporters.
Meanwhile, the British Defense Ministry claimed on Monday that more than a quarter of Russia’s armed units in Ukraine is now “combat ineffective,” meaning they are unable to fight due to a lack of troops or equipment.
Faced with losses, Russian President Vladimir Putin has moved his focus to the Donbas, Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland, where Moscow-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian forces since 2014, presumably looking for a triumph to show the Russian people.
Russia claims to have hit dozens of military targets in the region alone in the last day. However, Ukrainian and Western officials warn that Moscow’s troops are employing indiscriminate weaponry and making only modest progress while killing a large number of people.
Mariupol, which is located in the Donbas, is crucial to Russia’s effort there. Its seizure would deprive Ukraine of a critical port, give Moscow a land passage to the Crimean Peninsula, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014, and free up soldiers for fighting elsewhere in the region.
According to one of the Ukrainian defenders, Russian forces began shelling the city’s steel mill on Sunday, following the evacuation.
Several hundred civilians remain trapped, along with almost 500 wounded soldiers and “many” dead bodies, according to Denys Shlega, commander of Ukraine’s National Guard’s 12th Operational Brigade, in a televised interview.
“There are still a few dozen tiny children in the bunkers beneath the factory,” Shlega claimed.
Approximately 1,000 people, as well as an estimated 2,000 Ukrainian fighters, were reported to remain in the huge, Soviet-era steel mill before the weekend evacuation. Mariupol, which had a pre-war population of more than 400,000 people, could have as many as 100,000 people still living there.
The Russian Defense Ministry announced on Monday that its forces had targeted dozens of military targets in eastern Ukraine in the previous 24 hours, including troop and weapon concentrations and an ammo dump near Chervone in the Zaporizhzhia region, west of the Donbas.
It was not possible to independently verify the information. In the previous 24 hours, at least three people have been killed and another seven, including a child, have been injured in the Donbas, according to the Ukrainian president’s office. According to the regional government in Zaporizhzhia, Russian shelling killed two individuals and injured four others.
It’s difficult to get a complete picture of the fighting in eastern Ukraine. Reporters are finding it difficult to move about because of the fighting, and both sides have imposed strong limits on reporting from the conflict zone.
Meanwhile, Ukraine announced on Monday that Russia had attacked a major road and rail bridge west of the Black Sea town of Odesa. Previous Russian bombings had severely damaged the bridge, and its demolition would cut off a supply channel for guns and other supplies from Romania.
The attacks on the bridge came after a senior Russian military officer claimed that Moscow wants to take control of all of Ukraine’s south and construct a land corridor to Transnistria, a separatist region of Moldova where some 1,500 Russian troops are stationed. Concerns have been expressed by Ukrainian and Western authorities that Russia could utilize the territory to start a new front in the conflict.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid have flown into Ukraine during the conflict, but Ukraine still requires huge assistance due to Russia’s vast armories. Zelensky has requested more armaments from the West, as well as tighter economic penalties against Russia.
On Saturday, US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other US officials paid a visit to Zelensky to demonstrate their support. The group met with Polish President Andrzej Duda and legislators in Warsaw on Monday to express gratitude for Poland’s assistance to Ukraine.
Energy ministers from across the European Union met on Monday to consider a fresh round of sanctions, which may include limitations on Russian oil — though Russia-dependent EU states such as Hungary and Slovakia are leery of taking harsh measures.
