The Russian military admitted late on Monday that the latest attempt to evacuate civilians allegedly trapped at the besieged Azovstal steel mill in Mariupol through a humanitarian corridor has failed, blaming Kyiv for that, Russian media report.
The head of Russia’s National Defense Management Center, Colonel-General Mikhail Mizintsev, accused the Kyiv authorities of disrupting this humanitarian operation during which no one has used the proposed humanitarian corridor.
He pointed out that despite repeatedly bemoaning the fate of the civilians stuck alongside Ukrainian fighters at the plant, Ukraine did nothing to facilitate their evacuation, confirming once again with the illogical and inconsistent behavior of its blatant indifference to the fate of individual citizens of their own country.
Ukraine, on the other side, has pinned the blame for the evacuation failure on Moscow with Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk stressing that Kyiv is ready to do whatever it takes to make the corridor work, but retracted shortly afterward claiming the corridor was not set up properly and does not work.
Vereshchuk claimed in a statement on Telegram that there are no agreements on humanitarian corridors from Azovstal and that a corridor announced unilaterally does not provide security and therefore is not a humanitarian corridor.
Filled with the fighters of the notorious neo-Nazi Azov regiment and other units holed up there, the sprawling industrial facility of the Azovstal steel plant remains the last stronghold under Ukrainian control.
Although the Ukrainian fighters were previously offered by Russia an opportunity to lay down their arms and surrender, they refused and instead demanded to be evacuated into an unspecified third country.
With the Russian and Donetsk forces completely surrounding the city, the battle for Mariupol has been raging for almost two months now since Russia invaded Ukraine in late February.
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