War in Ukraine: twenty civilians left the Azovstal site in Mariupol to be evacuated

Hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, including dozens of children, are stranded, according to kyiv, on the Azovstal site, with the last Ukrainian fighters in the city. The end of an ordeal? This early Saturday evening, the Azov regiment, which is defending the site, announced that twenty civilians left the Azovstal factory in Mariupol on Saturday to be evacuated to Zaporijjia. “Twenty civilians, women and children (. ..) have been transferred to an agreed place and we hope that they will be evacuated to Zaporizhia, in the territory controlled by Ukraine,” said Sviatoslav Palamar, deputy commander of the Azov regiment in a video on Telegram. Cease it -fire A few hours earlier, the official Russian agency Tass announced that a group of 25 civilians, including six children, had been able to get out of Azovstal, a huge steelworks where hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians are blocked. No attempt to evacuate Azovstal has been successful so far.”All night the enemy artillery bombarded the site. The ceasefire which was to start at 6am did not start until 11 a.m. Since then, both parties have respected it. The evacuation convoy that we were expecting at 6 a.m. did not arrive until 6.25 p.m., according to Sviatoslav Palamar. “The Azov regiment continues to clear the rubble to get civilians out. We hope that this process will continue and that we will succeed in evacuating all the civilians”, he added. the site of Azovstal, with the last Ukrainian fighters in the city, almost completely destroyed and controlled by Russian forces after weeks of siege. The Ukrainian presidency had announced the day before that the evacuation of the civilians holed up in the Azovstal factory was “planned” for Friday. The coordinator of the UN in Ukraine, Osnat Lubrani, announced on Thursday that she was leaving for the south of the country to prepare an evacuation attempt from Mariupol. The UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, visiting kyiv on Thursday, assured of his side that the organization was doing “everything possible” to evacuate civilians stuck in the “apocalypse” of Mariupol, which had half a million people before the Russian invasion launched at the end of February.