How will the Siege of Mariupol end? “We are ready to leave Mariupol with the help of a third party”armed with weapons, “in order to save the people entrusted to our care”said Thursday, April 21, a commander of the Azov Battalion, one of two last combat units in Mariupol. “The situation is difficult, even critical”does he have admitted, while several hundred civilians, lacking food and water, are entrenched in the Azovstal factory, according to the Ukrainian authorities. Follow our live.
kyiv offers to negotiate on Mariupol. Ukraine said it was open on Wednesday to a “special negotiating session” on the fate of this strategic city. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky mentions“about a thousand civilians, women and children” and “hundreds injured”.
Another failed evacuation. A humanitarian corridor, which had in principle been negotiated to allow the evacuation of civilians from Mariupol on Wednesday, “did not work”, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said in the evening. She blamed the Russians for violating the ceasefire and blocking buses, while Moscow accused “the Kyiv authorities for cynically scuttling this humanitarian operation”.
The fighting are continuing. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense reported on Wednesday that “assault attempts” on the localities of Sulyguivka and Dibrivne, in the Kharkiv region, as well as on Rubizhne and Severodonetsk, in the Luhansk region. “The situation is getting more complicated every hour”, wrote the governor of Luhansk, Sergei Gaïdaï, renewing his calls for civilians to evacuate. The bombardments also intensified in the south of the country.