Ukraine asked Doctors Without Borders (MSF) on Saturday to organize a mission to evacuate and treat the soldiers entrenched in the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, in a press release released a few hours after the announcement of the evacuation of civilians.
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk wrote a letter to Michel-Olivier Lacharité, head of emergency programs at the humanitarian organization and MSF head of mission in Ukraine, said a statement from the Ministry of Reintegration of the Territories temporarily occupied from Ukraine.
The ministry, “referring to the principles that guide the work of the MSF organization, calls on MSF to organize a mission to evacuate the defenders from Mariupol and Azovstal and to provide care for the wounded, whose human rights have been violated by the Russian Federation,” the English-language statement read.
The defenders of the huge industrial site “have been for 72 days in a row, under incessant shelling and attacks by the Russian army” and through “lack of medicine, water and food, wounded soldiers are dying of gangrene and sepsis,” the ministry said.
Earlier in the day, kyiv announced that all the civilian women, children and elderly who were hiding with the soldiers had been evacuated from the maze of Soviet-era basements at this huge industrial site, last pocket of resistance of Ukrainian forces against the Russian army in the besieged and devastated port city.
On Friday, 50 people, again the most vulnerable civilians, were able to leave the steel complex in the southeastern port city.
These operations, which have been taking place for a week under the aegis of the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), have enabled, according to kyiv, nearly 500 civilians to flee.