Some women and children were evacuated from a steel plant that is the last defensive stronghold in the bombed-out ruins of the port city of Mariupol, a Ukrainian official and Russian state news organizations said, but hundreds are believed to remain trapped with little food, water or medicine.
The United Nations was working to broker an evacuation of the up to 1,000 civilians living beneath the sprawling Soviet-era Azovstal plant after numerous previous attempts failed. Ukraine has not said how many fighters are also in the plant, the only part of Mariupol is not occupied by Russian forces, but Russia put the number at about 2,000. An estimated 100,000 civilians remain in the city.
U.N. humanitarian spokesperson Saviano Abreu said the world organization was negotiating with authorities in Moscow and Kyiv, but he could not provide details of the ongoing evacuation effort “because of the complexity and fluidity of the operation.”
“There are, right now, ongoing, high-level engagements with all the governments, Russia and Ukraine, to make sure that you can save civilians and support the evacuation of civilians from the plant,” Abreu told the AP. He would not confirm the video posted on social media purportedly showing U.N.-marked vehicles in Mariupol.
Ukraine has blamed the failure of numerous previous evacuation attempts on continued Russian shelling.
Russian forces have embarked on a major military operation to seize significant parts of southern and eastern Ukraine, the country’s industrial heartland. Ukrainian forces fought village by village Saturday to hold back the Russian advance.
Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency said Saturday that 19 adults and six children were brought out from the steelworks, but gave no further details.
A top official with the Azov Regiment, the Ukrainian unit defending the plant, said 20 civilians were evacuated during a cease-fire, though it was not clear if he was referring to the same group. There was no confirmation from the U.N.
“These are women and children,” Sviatoslav Palamar said in a video posted on the regiment’s Telegram channel. He also called for the evacuation of the wounded: “We don’t know why they are not taken away and their evacuation to the territory controlled by Ukraine is not being discussed.”
Video and images from inside the plant, shared by two Ukrainian women who said their husbands are among the fighters refusing to surrender there, showed unidentified men with stained bandages; others had open wounds or amputated limbs.
A skeleton medical staff was treating at least 600 wounded people, said the women, who identified their husbands as members of the Azov Regiment of Ukraine’s National Guard. Some of the wounds were rotting with gangrene, they said.
In the video, the men said that they eat just once daily and share as little as 1.5 liters (50 ounces) of water a day among four people and that supplies inside the besieged facility are depleted.
One shirtless man appeared to be in pain as he described his wounds: two broken ribs, a punctured lung, and a dislocated arm that “was hanging on the flesh.”
“I want to tell everyone who sees this: If you will not stop this here, in Ukraine, it will go further, to Europe,” he said.
The women urged that Ukrainian fighters also be evacuated alongside civilians, warning they could be tortured and executed if captured. “The lives of soldiers matter, too,” Yuliia Fedusiuk told in Rome.
In his nightly video address late Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy switched into Russian to urge Russian troops not to fight in Ukraine, saying even their generals expect that thousands more of them will die.
The president accused Moscow of recruiting new soldiers “with little motivation and little combat experience” so that units gutted early in the war can be thrown back into battle.
“Every Russian soldier can still save his own life,” Zelenskyy said. “It’s better for you to survive in Russia than to perish on our land.”
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