More than 140 civilians and five Ukrainian troops have been evacuated from the besieged port city of Mariupol, separatists said, as Moscow intensified its offensive in the east.
“Five servicemen of Ukraine’s armed forces laid down their arms and voluntarily left the territory of the Azovstal plant,” separatist authorities in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic said in a post on the messaging app Telegram on Wednesday.
In a separate post late Tuesday, separatists said that more than 140 people had also been evacuated from the devastated city, which provides a crucial land bridge between Russian-controlled parts of eastern Ukraine and the Kremlin-annexed Crimea peninsula.
The Kremlin’s forces are fighting to oust the remaining Ukrainian troops from their last holdout in the vast Azovstal iron and steel plant in Mariupol.
Moscow said that Russian forces had opened a humanitarian corridor for Ukrainian troops who agreed to lay down their arms to leave Mariupol.
Ukraine said it had agreed with Russian forces to open a safe route Wednesday for civilians to flee the besieged port city of Mariupol.
“Taking into account a catastrophic humanitarian situation in Mariupol, we’ll be concentrating our efforts in this direction today,” Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk wrote on Telegram.
“We have managed to get a preliminary agreement on a humanitarian corridor for women, children and elderly persons,” she said.
Vereshchuk told civilians to gather at 2:00 p.m. (1100 GMT) for the evacuations heading to the Ukrainian-held city of Zaporizhzhia.
But she warned that “with regard to the very difficult security situation, changes may occur during the corridor.”
Evacuations from Ukraine’s under-fire frontline areas had been suspended for the past three days as Kyiv said no agreement could be reached as Russia stepped up its attacks.
Coastal Mariupol is a key target of Russia’s devastating attack on Ukraine and widespread shelling has laid waste to swathes of the city.
Moscow has issued a series of ultimatums to Ukrainian forces in Mariupol to lay down their arms and surrender.
Ukraine says that around 300,000 people have managed to escape the fighting across the country through humanitarian corridors opened since the start of the Russian invasion on February 24.