This is the end of the tunnel, literally and figuratively, for this handful of Ukrainians.
Twenty civilians were finally able to get out of the huge Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, a port in southeastern Ukraine besieged by the Russians, on Saturday.
The Azov “battalion”, which defends the Azovstal steelworks, announced at the start of the evening that twenty civilians, women and children (…) had been able to leave the factory where living conditions have been dramatic for weeks.
Most had been living in shelters in the form of tunnels for weeks.
“They have been transferred to an agreed place and we hope that they will be evacuated to Zaporizhia, in the territory controlled by Ukraine,” said Sviatoslav Palamar, deputy commander of the Azov regiment in a video on Telegram.
No attempt to evacuate Azovstal, the ultimate redoubt controlled by Ukrainian forces in Mariupol, had so far succeeded.
The regiment's fighters continued to clear the rubble after heavy shelling of the site the day before and into the night, to extract other civilians.
"We hope that this process will continue and that we will manage to evacuate all civilians," added Commander Palamar.
VIDEO.
'I hope to see the sun again': Hundreds of civilians trapped under Azovstal factory in Mariupol
A few hours earlier, the official Russian agency Tass had announced that a group of 25 civilians, including six children.
This news does not undermine the Russian determination to seize the last pocket of resistance in the martyr port of southern Ukraine.
All the objectives of the "special military operation" - the term used by the Kremlin for this war - "will be achieved despite the obstruction of our adversaries", Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in a interview with the new China news agency published this Saturday.
