MOSCOW (dpa-AFX) – According to information from Moscow, more people have been evacuated from the besieged port city of Mariupol in southeastern Ukraine. Almost 13,700 more residents had been brought to safety, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced on Friday evening in Moscow. The humanitarian situation in Mariupol is particularly dramatic. More than 3,100 people were rescued from embattled villages and towns in the Kyiv, Kharkiv and Zhytomyr regions. This could not be verified independently.
In the evening, the Ukrainian side spoke of a total of around 13,000 people who had managed to escape via corridors. A large part of this is accounted for by the city of Sumy in the north-east. The information from Kyiv usually takes into account the refugees who were taken to another Ukrainian region. The Russian ministry did not provide any information on where people from Mariupol were taken.
However, more than 4.5 million people are still left behind in larger Ukrainian cities under siege, the ministry in Moscow claimed, according to the Interfax agency. It once again accused the neighboring country of preventing the creation of escape corridors. Kyiv has leveled similar allegations against the Russian military.
According to Moscow, almost 300,000 people have been brought to Russia for more than three weeks, mainly from the separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine. Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin had recognized the self-proclaimed People’s Republics as independent against international protests. / cht / DP / stw