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Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed on Thursday that he had “liberated” the strategic port city of Mariupol in Ukraine, which was questioned by his American envoy Joe Biden, who announced an additional military aid of 800 million dollars to kyiv.
It comes as anti-Ukrainian troops are concentrating on the large “Azovestal” steelworks in this coastal city south of the Donbass region, which has become a heap of rubble after being besieged by Russian forces for nearly two hours. Month.
They refuse to surrender and Sviatoslav Palmer, deputy commander of the “Azov” battalion, asks by telegram for a “guarantee” of security to the “civilized world”.
Despite a new call to lay down their arms for the Ukrainian militants who withdrew Thursday in the industrial complex “Azovstel”, they refused to surrender.
In this context, Putin, during a meeting with his Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, deemed the plan to attack the industrial zone “inappropriate” and ordered its “cancellation”.
“We must take into account the life and health of our soldiers and officers, and we must not cross these ditches”, he declared, but “besiege the whole area so that no fly can pass” .
Biden, on the other hand, viewed the Russian military’s control of the city as “questionable.” “There is no proof yet that Mariupol has completely fallen,” he said, stressing that Putin “would never succeed in controlling and occupying the whole of Ukraine.”
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry wrote a tweet yesterday recalling a call from the commander of the “Azov” battalion demanding the establishment of an “emergency humanitarian corridor” with security “guarantees” to evacuate civilians. “There are still too many” in the factory.
On Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Jelensky confirmed that “thousands of civilians, including women and children” were still in the factory, as well as “hundreds of injured”. Thursday, Mariupol Meyer spoke of “300,000 to 1,000 civilians”.
According to Sergei Shoiku, there are still 2,000 militants at the steel plant, and the Russian Defense Minister has not named any of them as civilians.
Figures reported from an independent source cannot be verified.
Amid the losses caused by the Russian invasion, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Jelensky announced on Thursday that he needed $7 billion a month to keep his country’s economy afloat.
After a meeting with officials of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, he said that “the Russian army aims to destroy all goods in Ukraine”.
The Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, Kristalina Georgieva, on Thursday stressed the need to provide financial assistance to Ukraine in the form of donations “to the extent possible”. Large debts on Kyiv complicating post-war recovery.
The dumps start again
The Ukrainian authorities fear that more than 20,000 people died in Mariupol, which had 450,000 inhabitants before the war, due to the fighting on the one hand and the lack of food, water and electricity on the other.
The Russian army took control of much of the city a few days ago and visited the captured sites with foreign journalists.
During the siege imposed on the city, the evacuation of civilians was rare and risky, but on Thursday Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vareshchuk revealed that four buses had left the city for Saboria, two hundred kilometers away, to evacuate civilians.
In the afternoon, three buses arrived in Saboria, said an AFP journalist.
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