Some 20,000 people managed to leave the besieged port city of Mariupol in Ukraine on Tuesday, driving along a humanitarian corridor agreed with Russian forces, a Ukrainian presidential assistant said.
“Today, around 20,000 people left Mariupol in private cars along the humanitarian corridor,” President Volodimir Zelensky's deputy chief of staff, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, said on Telegram. “Of the 4,000 cars that left the city, 570 have already arrived in Zaporiyia,” he added.
Mariupol, a city of about 500,000 inhabitants, in southeastern Ukraine and on the shores of the Azov Sea, is suffering the most serious humanitarian crisis since the Russian Army invasion of the country broke out on February 24.
The city no longer has basic services such as gas, electricity or heating, and water, food and medicine are scarce, according to local authorities.
Meanwhile, different sources from Ukraine reported that Russian forces have taken patients and medical personnel from a hospital in Mariupol hostage.
According to the BBC, Mariupol Deputy Mayor Sergei Orlov said: “We received information that the Russian army captured our largest hospital... and they are using our patients and doctors as hostages. We can confirm this information and also the governor of the Donetsk region has confirmed this confirmation. We received information that there are 400 people there.”
Russian troops reportedly took some 400 people from neighboring homes to the Regional Intensive Care Hospital on the outskirts of Mariupol, where they are now being held hostage.
On Monday, Zelensky had announced that the humanitarian assistance that the Government of Ukraine was trying to bring to the port city remained blocked, which further worsened the situation.
The Russian and Ukrainian authorities have held up to three rounds of direct negotiations on the Belarus-Polish border, in which they agreed to open several humanitarian corridors that have not fully worked.
Both sides have accused each other of interrupting these corridors through which they try to evacuate citizens to safe areas and to transport medicines, water and food to the populations most affected by the Russian bombings.
Mariupol is under an increasingly relentless assault that is taking an indescribable toll. Ukrainian estimates of the number of civilians trapped in the city have ranged from 200,000 to 400,000, and the latest estimate is 300,000, according to a report by The New York Times.
With information from AFP and EFE
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