According to information from Kyiv, 20,000 other civilians managed to escape from the besieged Ukrainian port of Mariupol. A total of 4,000 private cars could have left the metropolis on the Azov Sea on Tuesday, wrote the deputy head of the presidential office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, on Telegram in the evening. Of these, 570 vehicles have already arrived in the city of Zaporizhia, more than 200 kilometers to the north-west, it said.
Mariupol, with a population of around 400,000, has been surrounded by Russian units for days and cut off from the rest of the country. Attempts by an aid convoy to bring food and medicine to Mariupol from the western city of Berdyansk failed again and again.
Meanwhile, fighting continued on the outskirts of Mariupol. The ultra-nationalist battalion Azov defeated a unit of Russian troops there, the Ukrainian general staff announced on Facebook in the evening. Russia continues to attack residential areas, schools and kindergartens with rockets and bombs, it said. Moscow has vehemently denied for almost three weeks that it was targeting civilians in the war against the neighboring country.
The head of the military administration of the Donetsk region, Pavlo Kyrylenko, also accused the Russians of besieging a hospital in Mariupol. “Russian occupiers have taken doctors and patients hostage,” he wrote on Telegram. The information could not initially be independently verified.
Just a few days ago, a Russian attack on the building of a Mariupol maternity clinic caused great horror. Moscow claimed the building was used by Ukrainian fighters. However, both the Ukrainian and the UN said that it was a functioning maternity clinic.