Survivors from the Mariupol steel plant reach safety.

On a fleet of city buses, flanked by white United Nations and Red Cross vehicles, just over 150 women and children who sheltered for weeks in the belly of Mariupol’s sprawling steelworks, amid the horror of an incessant Russian bombing campaign, arrived on Tuesday at the parking lot of a home goods store in the relative safety of Ukrainian-controlled territory.

Their evacuation was a rare but limited victory for diplomacy, and an unusual concession to human dignity by Russian forces who have inflicted death and misery upon civilian populations across a broad swath of Ukraine since the war began on Feb. 24.

“I was in Azovstal for two and a half months and they slammed us from all sides,” said Olga Savina, an elderly woman, as she emerged from a white bus. She said the sun burned her eyes after so many days underground. Read more

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