Yvan mechanically checks his phone to see if he has received any news from Azovstal. The evacuation operation can end at any time as for the first time. “The first civilians got on the buses and the soldiers of the Azov regiment then went back to pick up the othershe says, Russian snipers fired at them, everything was suspended.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had announced that he hoped to release 500 civilians still stranded in the Mariupol steel complex, the only pocket of resistance in the southern port held almost entirely by the Russian army. But late in the evening of Friday May 6, fifty people finally left, according to the Ukrainian deputy minister.
More than 200 kilometers away, in Zaporijia, everything is ready to await this new wave of evacuations, the refugee center already welcomes every day all the inhabitants of Mariupol and the surrounding villages fleeing the fighting. The metallurgical group Azovstal has opened its crisis unit there which welcomes employees who have left the site: Yvan is one of the directors of the Mariupol site which welcomed the first evacuees. He worries about those who are still stuck inside and regularly checks in with the employees he knows, like this man who tried to negotiate his release with the Russian army on his own.
“When the Russian soldiers learned that he was in maintenance, and that as such he was familiar with the approaches and the tunnels, they began to interrogate him and torture him with shocks. electrical.”
Yvan one of the directors of the Azovstal site in Mariupolat franceinfo
The employee has since been released from the hospital. The Azov regiment, the main Ukrainian group fighting at the Azovstal factory, accuses the Russian soldiers of continuing their artillery fire, and also demands the evacuation of the wounded Ukrainian soldiers.
The Azovstal steel complex is huge: 11 km2 of streets, buildings, basements, how many are still inside? The figures vary: 2,000, then 200 civilians according to the Ukrainian authorities. For Yvan, it is impossible to know. “Look at the map on Google Maps! Azovstal is a city within the city: in this complex there are 45 separate workshops, each one has one or two shelters but they do not communicate with each other, so no one knows who is in the shelter next door.”
When the first evacuees arrived in Zaporizhia, Azovstal provided its employees with humanitarian aid and psychologists, but speaking with its traumatized refugees, Yvan realized that they were also misinformed. “Unfortunately, they don’t know what is happening elsewhere in Ukraine, they don’t know everything their employer and their homeland are doing to get them out of there, at the same time, Russian propaganda tells them that they were abandoned while it is the Russian army that prevents us from coming to their aid.” The first evacuated employees are resting today, for some in holiday centers in Azovstal.