Russia’s siege of Mariupol continues. Air, artillery, and missile strikes are gradually reducing Ukrainian holdouts inside of the Azovstal Steel Plant to rubble. But the first civilian evacuees have finally reached safety.
With Mariupol under Russian control, the last enclave of Ukrainian troops inside the steel plant has been sheltering about 1,000 civilians. They have been forced to live underground in bunkers, with no sunlight, little food, and scarce water for several weeks. Attempts to negotiate an evacuation took a long time but were finally realized.
A Harrowing Journey from Mariupol
The United Nations confirmed that 127 civilians were successfully evacuated. They boarded buses for a 140-mile trip to the city of Zaporizhzhia. Prior to the Russian invasion that trip took three hours, but the evacuees had to endure a grueling three-day journey through Russian-held territory before they finally reached safety.
When the first civilians reached Zaporizhzhia, they appeared pale and exhausted. They carried whatever possessions they still held in bags. At the reception point, a team from Doctors Without Borders was there to treat them.
The evacuated Mariupol civilians told officials of living underground for weeks without seeing the sun, and how the incessant shelling had caused some of the bunkers they were living in to collapse on top of them. Others told the media that they were worried about their family members still trapped in Mariupol.
In a released statement, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he hopes Kyiv and Moscow will continue to coordinate humanitarian pauses to allow civilians safe passage away from the city.
Mariupol had a population of about 400,000 people at the start of the war. Only about 100,000 civilians remain in the city, and a thousand of them have been living in underground bunkers at the sprawling steel plant, which covers 4.2 square miles. Ukrainian officials estimate that up to 20,000 civilians have been killed inside Mariupol during the fighting.
No Food, Water, or Medicine in Mariupol Plant
Mykhailo Vershynin, one of the Ukrainian troops holding out in the steel plant Mariupol, described the conditions the defenders live through as the siege continues. Speaking to the Today program on BBC Radio 4, he said that about 500 people are wounded in the plant.
About 200 of the wounded are in critical condition, he added, saying the hospital staff struggles with a “total lack of everything:” food and water as well as medication. Russian forces purposefully attacked the hospital, he added.
Image Credit: Creative Commons.
Yavoriv, Ukraine – Ukrainian soldiers assigned to 1st Battalion, 92nd Mechanized Brigade, participate in a platoon live-fire exercise here Dec. 1. During the exercise the unit engaged targets from their BTR-4 armored personnel carriers before dismounting and assaulting the remaining objectives on foot. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Alexander Rector)
Satellite images from Maxar Technologies showed that nearly every building in the plant Mariupol is either flattened or has had its roof blown off. Some of the evacuees said that after their food ran out, they were forced to stand in line, sometimes for days at a time, to receive a box of humanitarian supplies from the Russians. One woman showed a can of meat to the New York Times that had an expiration date in January, a month before the invasion began.
Steve Balestrieri is a 1945 National Security Columnist. He has served as a US Army Special Forces NCO and Warrant Officer before injuries forced his early separation. In addition to writing for 19fortyfive.com, he has covered the NFL for PatsFans.com for more than 10 years and his work was regularly featured in the Millbury-Sutton Chronicle and Grafton News newspapers in Massachusetts.
