The Mariupol City Council announced that a new evacuation attempt will be made at noon this Sunday (6), local time (7 am in Brasilia), after a breach of the ceasefire prevented the continuation of the operation the day before.
The plan is for the evacuation of part of the 400,000 residents surrounded by Russian forces in the port city to take place this Saturday (5). Attacks along the humanitarian corridor route, however, prevented the operation from proceeding. The temporary ceasefire is expected to last until 21:00 in Ukraine (16:00 in BrasÃlia).
In addition to Mariupol, the evacuation was also interrupted in Volnovakha, the second Ukrainian city where a similar action was planned and which is also surrounded by Vladimir Putin’s troops. No plans for a further withdrawal have yet been announced, however.
Russia and Ukraine exchanged accusations over the attacks carried out on Saturday. Earlier this morning, the Mariupol legislature accused Russian troops of not respecting their promises, and later the city council asked residents to return to shelters “for security reasons”.
“We call on Russia to end the bombing and return the ceasefire so that children, women and the elderly can leave the settlements,” Irina Vereshchuk, minister for the Occupied Territories, said of the situation in Volnovakha, according to Ukraine’s Pravda newspaper.
Moscow, for its part, said the agreement was not fulfilled by the Ukrainians. In a conversation with Aeroflot employees on Saturday, Putin denied that the country’s forces had broken the ceasefire. The Russian president accused “Ukrainian thugs and neo-Nazis” of preventing people from leaving cities. “We are in negotiation,” he said, regarding the talks of the Russian and Ukrainian delegations that took place in Belarus.
Mikhail Mizintsev, head of Russia’s National Defense Command Center, reiterated Putin’s position and said the truce had been broken by “Ukrainian nationalists”.
The Ukrainian government intended on Saturday to assist the evacuation of about 200,000 people in Mariupol and another 15,000 in Volnovakha. It is not yet known for sure how many were actually able to leave before the interruption of the operation.
Considered strategic by Moscow, Mariupol is a port city in southeastern Ukraine located 150 km from Rostov-on-Don, the main city in southern Russia. It was attacked from the first day of the war and is an important port on the Sea of ​​Azov, a minor division of the Black Sea. The city is also considered the last point of resistance to prevent the establishment of a land bridge linking Rostov to Crimea, annexed in 2014 by Putin.
Russia and Ukraine had agreed to establish humanitarian corridors on Thursday (3), during a meeting of delegations from the two countries for negotiations in Belarus. This Saturday, despite the exchanges of accusations, the adviser to the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, Anton Heraschenko, said that more agreements must be reached for the implementation of new exit routes in other territories of the country.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is also said to have discussed with his Belarusian counterpart Vladimir Makei the establishment of other routes, according to the RIA news agency.
Humanitarian corridors or security zones imply a ceasefire, something that, as seen in the Bosnian war in the 1990s, is a very precarious instrument. In addition, they can be used to vacate areas of potentially hostile civilians to invaders, with no guarantees that they will ever return to their homes.
The move could facilitate the eventual military occupation of territories and further Putin’s presumed plan to remove the area from Ukrainian sovereignty.
