hi INDiA Copyright 2022-2050
Zaporizhzhia (Ukraine), May 2
A long-awaited evacuation of civilians from a besieged steel plant in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol was under way on Sunday, as US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi revealed that she visited Ukraine’s president to show unflinching American support for the country’s defence against Russia’s invasion.
Video posted online by Ukrainian forces showed elderly women and mothers with small children bundled in winter clothing being helped as they climbed a steep pile of debris from the sprawling Azovstal steel plant’s rubble, and then eventually boarded a bus.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said more than 100 civilians, primarily women and children, were expected to arrive in the Ukrainian-controlled city of Zaporizhzhia on Monday.
“Today, for the first time in all the days of the war, this vitally needed (humanitarian) corridor has started working,” he said in a pre-recorded address published on his Telegram messaging app channel.
The Mariupol City Council said on Telegram that the evacuation of civilians from other parts of the city would begin on Monday morning. People fleeing Russian-occupied areas in the past have described their vehicles being fired on, and Ukrainian officials have repeatedly accused Russian forces of shelling evacuation routes on which the two sides had agreed.
Later on Sunday, one of the plant’s defenders said Russian forces resumed shelling the plant as soon as the evacuation of a group of civilians was completed.
Sviastoslav Palamar, deputy commander of the Azov Regiment, which is helping defend the steel plant, told The Associated Press in an interview from Mariupol on Sunday that it has been difficult even to reach some of the wounded inside the plant.
“There’s rubble. We have no special equipment. It’s hard for soldiers to pick up slabs weighing tons only with their arms,” he said. “We hear voices of people who are still alive” inside shattered buildings.
Mariupol, a port city on the Sea of Azov, is a key target because of its strategic location near the Crimea Peninsula, which Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014.
UN humanitarian spokesman Saviano Abreu said civilians who have been stranded for nearly two months at the plant would receive immediate humanitarian support, including psychological services, once they arrive in Zaporizhzhia, about 230 kilometre northwest of Mariupol.
Mariupol has seen some of the worst suffering. A maternity hospital was hit with a lethal Russian airstrike in the opening weeks of the war, and about 300 people were reported killed in the bombing of a theatre where civilians were taking shelter.
Ukrainian regiment Deputy Commander Sviatoslav Palamar, meanwhile, called for the evacuation of wounded Ukrainian fighters as well as civilians. “We don’t know why they are not taken away, and their evacuation to the territory controlled by Ukraine is not being discussed,” he said in a video posted Saturday on the regiment’s Telegram channel.
Meanwhile, Pelosi and other US lawmakers visited Kyiv on Saturday.
Jason Crow, a US Army veteran and a member of the House intelligence and armed services committees, said he came to Ukraine with three areas of focus: “Weapons, weapons and weapons.”
In his nightly televised address Sunday, Zelenskyy said more than 3.5 lakh people had been evacuated from combat zones; thanks to humanitarian corridors pre-agreed with Moscow since the start of Russia’s invasion. “The organisation of humanitarian corridors is one of the elements of the negotiation process (with Russia), which is ongoing,” he said.
Zelenskyy also accused Moscow of waging “a war of extermination,” saying Russian shelling had hit food, grain and fertiliser warehouses, and residential neighborhoods in the Kharkiv, Donbas and other regions.
“What could be Russia’s strategic success in this war? Honestly, I do not know. The ruined lives of people and the burned or stolen property will give nothing to Russia,” he said.