Ukrainian authorities in besieged Mariupol said on Thursday about 15,000 civilians had been illegally deported to Russia since Russian forces seized parts of the southern port city.
Ukrainian officials say civilians trapped in Mariupol, which is normally home to about 400,000 people, face a desperate plight without access to food, water, power or heat.
Local authorities said on Sunday that thousands of residents had been taken by force across the border but did not provide a more precise figure. Russian news agencies said at the time that buses had carried several hundred people Moscow calls refugees from Mariupol to Russia in recent days.
“Residents of the Left Bank district are beginning to be deported en masse to Russia. In total, about 15,000 Mariupol residents have been subjected to illegal deportation,” Mariupol city council said in a statement issued on Thursday.
Some refugees from Mariupol, after traveling all day on the buses provided by the government, humanitarian organizations and associations, spent the night in a kindergarten in Zaporizhia, Ukraine on March 23.
Andrea Carrubba/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Russia denies targeting civilians in what President Vladimir Putin calls a “special military operation” to demilitarize and “denazify” Ukraine. Ukraine and the West say Putin launched an unprovoked war of aggression.
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Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk told a video briefing that Ukrainian authorities were continuing efforts to secure agreement from Russia to open a safe corridor to and from Mariupol.
Each side has blamed the other for the repeated failure to agree on arrangements to evacuate civilians from Mariupol, control of which would help Russia secure a land corridor to the Crimea peninsula that Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a video address to Italy’s parliament on Tuesday that there was “nothing left” in Mariupol after weeks of Russian bombardment.
Refugees coming mostly from the Mariupol area and arriving with the last humanitarian convoy consisting of 15 buses, take the train to the Zaporizhia station to continue their journey west in Zaporizhia, Ukraine on March 23.
Andrea Carrubba/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
A Reuters team that reached a Russian-controlled part of Mariupol on Sunday described a wasteland of charred apartment blocks and bodies wrapped in blankets lying by a road.
(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk, Writing by Timothy Heritage, Editing by Nick Macfie)
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