Russian troops took 400 people hostage in a hospital in Mariupol

Different sources from Ukraine report that Russian forces have taken patients and medical personnel hostage from a hospital in the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol.

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.

For his part, the region's top official, Pavlo Kyrylenko, who until martial law was declared its governor, also announced that the Russians were holding doctors and patients from the main intensive care hospital hostage.

“It is impossible to leave the hospital,” Kyrylenko wrote in Telegram, citing a message from one of the center's employees. “There are heavy shelling, we stayed in the basement. The vehicles haven't been able to reach the hospital for two days. The high-rise buildings are burning around. [...] The Russians took 400 people from neighboring houses to our hospital. We can't leave.”

The Media Initiative for Human Rights in Ukraine alerted in a Facebook post on Tuesday that residents of the city contacted its hotline to report on the occupation of Russian troops in the hospital.

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.

Some 2,000 vehicles were able to leave the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, besieged by Russian forces and pro-Russian separatists, through a humanitarian corridor, the city council reported on Tuesday.

“Two thousand more cars are waiting to leave the city,” Mariupol City Council said, although it did not indicate how many people had been able to flee the port city, where living conditions are terrible, after days of shelling and siege.

On Monday, 160 vehicles managed to leave, according to the same source, which shows that after a series of failures, due to the impossibility of reaching a ceasefire in the conflict, evacuations have accelerated.

The humanitarian corridor that all these cars take connects Mariupol with Zaporiyia, through Berdyansk, that is about 270 km of road.

Located about 55 km from the Russian border and 85 km from the Donetsk separatist fief, Mariupol is the largest city still held by Kiev in the Donbas area, where Donetsk and Luhansk meet.

Keep reading: