All the women, children and elderly people who were trapped for weeks in the besieged Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol have been evacuated, Russian and Ukrainian officials said on Saturday, after days of start-and-stop efforts to get the last civilians out.
“This part of the Mariupol humanitarian mission has been completed,” Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, said on Telegram.
Hours later, Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a statement that “a humanitarian operation to evacuate civilians” from the complex was completed on Saturday, with help from representatives of the U.N. and the Red Cross.
The office of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine thanked the two groups for helping with the “first phase” of evacuations and said that the more than 300 civilians who had been in the plant were rescued. The next goal would be to evacuate the wounded and medics. Read more
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