Thousands of civilians from the besieged city of Mariupolon the coast of the Sea of Azov, resist the continuous shelling by russian troops refugees in the facilities of the Azovstal steelworks, a former metallurgical plant created in the 1930s. “Civilians, including women and childrentake refuge in the facilities of the Azovstal plant,” Mariupol police chief Mykhailo Vershynin said Monday in statements made on a local television program, according to the Ukrinform agency.
Vershynin made these comments while speaking on the show with the former Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov regarding the situation in that city, besieged by Russian troops for weeks. According to Avakov, “there are many people in the Azovstal bunkers: women, elderly, children. All of them (live) in terrible conditions, with no medicine, no food, no water.”
All these people have been hiding from the continuous bombing, which have practically destroyed the entire city, in the cellars and caves of these ancient blast furnaces. The former minister denounced that the Russians “to cover up their crimes, use the civilian population remaining in Mariupol to dig up rubble, collect bodies and dig mass graves.
“People work for the food” they can get from the Russian military, he charged. Besides, “the russians are forcing civilians to wear a white bandage, on the right leg and the left arm, as in the army of the Russian Federation and the so-called ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ (pro-Russian Ukrainian region whose sovereignty has been recognized by Moscow)”.
Mariupol will resist “until the end”, but Moscow warns: those who do not surrender will be eliminated
J. Dastis
Beyond the battle for the strategic port enclave, in the sights of the Kremlin since the beginning of the invasion, Russian bombing continues to claim the lives of civilians in several cities in the east of the country
In this way, force local residents to act as “combatants and intentionally send them to firing points, where people can die,” added the former minister. The city of Mariúpol once had a population of half a million inhabitants and today only regarding 100,000 residents remainwho face a humanitarian catastrophe, since they do not have basic services.
Moscow issued an ultimatum this weekend to the city residents and fighters for them to surrender, something Ukraine rejected.
