Around 100 Ukrainian civilians were being evacuated from a ruined steelworks in the city of Mariupol on Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, after the United Nations had confirmed a “safe passage operation” was in progress there.
Mariupol, a strategic port city on the Azov Sea, has endured the most destructive siege of the war, with Pope Francis, in an implicit criticism of Russia, telling thousands of people in St Peter’s Square on Sunday it had been “barbarously bombarded”.
“Grateful to our team! Now they, together with (United Nations), are working on the evacuation of other civilians from the plant,” Zelenskiy tweeted. The evacuees would reach the Ukrainian-controlled city of Zaporizhzhia on Monday, he said.
With fighting stretching along a broad front in southern and eastern Ukraine, U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi pledged continued U.S. support for Ukraine when she met Zelenskiy in an unannounced visit to Kyiv.
Russia, meanwhile, said it had destroyed a stock of Western-supplied weapons at an airfield near Odesa, in southern Ukraine.
Moscow has turned its focus to Ukraine’s south and east after failing to capture Kyiv in the early weeks of a war that has flattened cities, killed thousands of civilians and forced more than 5 million to flee the country.
In Mariupol, Russia declared victory on April 21 even as hundreds of holdout Ukrainian troops and civilians took shelter in the city’s Azovstal steel works, a vast Soviet-era complex with a network of bunkers and tunnels, where they have been trapped with little food, water or medicine.
Negotiations to evacuate the civilians had repeatedly broken down in recent weeks, with Russia and Ukraine blaming each other.
But on Sunday, more than 50 civilians arrived at a temporary accommodation centre after escaping from Mariupol, a Reuters photographer said.
The civilians arrived on buses at the Russian-held village of Bezimenne, around 30 km (18 miles) east of Mariupol, where a row of light blue tents had been set up, in a convoy with U.N. and Russian military vehicles.
A spokesperson for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said a “safe passage operation” had started on Saturday and was being coordinated with the International Committee of the Red Cross, Russia and Ukraine.
He said no further details could be released so as not to jeopardise the safety of evacuees and the convoy.
Footage posted by Zelenskiy on Twitter on Sunday showed him, flanked by an armed escort and dressed in military fatigues, greeting a U.S. Congressional delegation led by Pelosi outside his presidential office the previous day.
