Efforts to evacuate civilians to safer areas will continue in Ukraine on Saturday, the country’s officials said.
Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said on the Telegram messaging app there will be another attempt to evacuate women, children and the elderly from the strategic port city of Mariupol, which has been besieged by Russian forces for weeks and reduced largely to smoking rubble by constant bombardment.
The Kremlin earlier this week declared that Mariupol has been “liberated,” with the exception of the Azovstal steel mill, the last pocket of resistance where Ukrainian troops are holed up.
Vereshchuk said that “if everything goes according to plan,” the evacuation in Mariupol will begin at midday on Saturday. Many previous attempts to evacuate civilians from the city have failed.
The governor of the eastern Luhansk region, Serhiy Haidai, said on Telegram that an evacuation train will depart Saturday from the eastern city of Pokrovsk. Residents of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which comprise Ukraine’s industrial heartland known as Donbas, will be able to take the train free of charge.
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