Mariupol : An additional 173 Ukrainian civilians were evacuated from the Azovstal steel plant in the besieged city of Mariupol, and have arrived in the southern city of Zaporizhzhya. In a social media post on Sunday, the Mariupol City Council said the civilians arrived in Zaporizhzhya on board 10 buses, reports Ukrayinska Pravda.
The Council added that three soldiers were killed and six others injured during the evacuation process.
It also thanked the UN, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk for facilitating the safe evacuation. It was not immediately known if some of the evacuated civilians were held in filtration camps on Russian-controlled territories, according to the commander of the Azov Regiment.
Russian occupiers do not allow everyone to immediately pass through their checkpoints. On Saturday, Vereshchuk had announced that all the remaining civilians from the bunkers of the Azovstal plant were safely evacuated. On May 1, the Ukrainian government, aided by the UN and the ICRC, was able to evacuate some of the civilians who were hiding from Russian forces in the bunkers of Azovstal, Ukrayinska Pravda reported. The evacuation convoy arrived in Zaporizhzhya two days later.
In order to enable this operation, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres conducted several meetings with world leaders and had also personally visited Moscow and Kiev to arrange .On May 4, 344 Azovstal civilians were evacuated to Zaporizhzhya via the “Mariupol corridor”. This was the second phase of the evacuation operation facilitated by the UN and the ICRC. Two days later, the Ukrainian government successfully evacuated 50 additional people, including children, from the steel plant.