War in Ukraine, Day 66 | Civilians evacuated to the Azovstal factory in Mariupol, bombardments on the airport of Odessa

(Kyiv) Twenty civilians were finally able to get out of the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, a port in southeastern Ukraine on Saturday, which could be the start of a larger evacuation of the last Ukrainian redoubt in the city. held by the Russians.

The Azov regiment, which defends the huge Azovstal complex, announced in the early evening that twenty civilians, women and children […] had been able to leave the factory where the living conditions have been dramatic for weeks.

“They have been transferred to an agreed place and we hope that they will be evacuated to Zaporizhia, in the territory controlled by Ukraine,” Svyatoslav Palamar, deputy commander of the Azov regiment, said in a video on Telegram.

No attempt to evacuate Azovstal, the ultimate redoubt controlled by Ukrainian forces in Mariupol, has so far failed.

The regiment’s fighters continued to clear the rubble after heavy shelling of the site the day before and into the night, to extract other civilians.

“We hope that this process will continue and that we will manage to evacuate all civilians,” added Commander Palamar.

A few hours earlier, the official Russian agency Tass had announced that a group of 25 civilians, including six children, had been able to get out of Azovstal, a metallurgical complex where hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians are blocked, holed up in underground galleries dating from the Soviet era.

“Many leaders are trying to help save our heroic city defenders. We discussed this in detail with the UN Secretary General during his visit to Kyiv. We are doing everything to ensure that the Mariupol evacuation mission is carried out,” Zelensky said in a video on Saturday evening.

“Depravity”

Further north, the bodies of three men were found Friday in a mass grave in Myrotske, a village near Boutcha, a small town that has become the symbol of the atrocities attributed to Russia.

The three men “had their hands tied, clothes around their faces so they couldn’t see anything and some had gags in their mouths”, the Kyiv region’s police chief said in a statement released on Saturday. , Andriï Nebytov. “The victims were tortured for a long time […] Eventually each of them was shot in the temple,” he added.

Residents of Boutcha, occupied in March by Russian forces, told AFP this week of the prisoners kneeling with their hands tied behind their backs, the summary executions and the pools of blood in the houses.

Those who saw “will remember it for hundreds of years”, said Viktor Chatylo, a resident of Yablounska Street, in which AFP had noted, on April 2, the presence of around twenty corpses of civilians after the departure of the Russian forces.

The Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, estimated at 900 Friday, in an interview with the Polish press, the number of bodies discovered in the Boutcha area. With Russian soldiers burning and burying bodies, “no one knows how many people perished”, he added.

The Ukrainian public prosecutor’s office has already announced the indictment of ten Russian soldiers, the listing of more than 8,000 war crimes in Ukraine, and the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, who visited Boutcha on Thursday , urged Moscow to cooperate with the investigation of the International Criminal Court.

But Moscow denied any responsibility and spoke of a “staging”. The Russian army went so far as to strike Kyiv while Mr. Guterres was there, killing a journalist and triggering a chorus of international protests.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby publicly questioned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “depravity” on Friday, admitting it was “difficult to watch certain images” of atrocities committed on Ukrainian civilians.

French President Emmanuel Macron, for his part, said after a telephone conversation with his Ukrainian counterpart that the mission of French experts would continue on the spot “contributing to the collection of evidence for […] allow the work of international justice relating to the crimes committed within the framework of the Russian aggression”.

He added that France would “reinforce” its shipments of military equipment to Ukraine – including long-range guns – to “restore Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”.

Odessa hit, Kharkiv pounded

In the south of the country, Odessa airport was hit by missile fire.

“The enemy struck from Crimea with a Bastion coastal defense missile system. The runway at Odessa airport was destroyed,” Governor Maxim Marchenko said in a video on his Telegram account.

Odessa, a large port city on the Black Sea of ​​one million inhabitants, with major symbolic and historical weight, has so far been relatively spared from the fighting.

It is located in the coastal strip that Russia could consider conquering to connect to the west with the pro-Russian separatist enclave of Transdniestria, in Moldova, where it has troops.

After defeating the Russian army in its offensive launched on February 24 on Kyiv, the Ukrainian forces are now struggling to contain the push into the east of the country by an army in numerical superiority and for the moment better armed, which seeks to grip them from the north and the south.

Volodymyr Zelensky notably acknowledged on Friday evening that the situation in the Kharkiv region, the country’s second largest city near the Russian border, was “difficult”.

Violent explosions were heard in the night from Friday to Saturday in the city, pounded for weeks by Russian artillery. The bombardments left one dead and several injured on Friday.

“If it was a war of infantry against infantry, we would have chances. But in this sector, it’s first of all an artillery war and we don’t have enough of it,” “Viking”, a 27-year-old staff sergeant who retired from Kreminna, told AFP. , eastern city taken by the Russians on April 18.

“Tactical” Achievements

All the objectives of the “special military operation” – the term used by the Kremlin for this war – “will be achieved despite the obstruction of our adversaries”, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in a statement. interview with the new China news agency published on Saturday.

The Ukrainian army did, however, manage to achieve “tactical” successes, Mr. Zelensky pointed out, such as in Rouska Lozova, a recaptured village north of Kharkiv, from where Russian forces were pounding the city. More than 600 residents have been evacuated from the village, which has been occupied for two months, according to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry.

Ukraine also struck strategic targets in Russian territory.

The governor of the Russian region of Bryansk, in northeastern Ukraine, Alexander Bogomaz, announced on Telegram that the air defense had “detected a plane of the Ukrainian armed forces” on Saturday morning, and that two shells had damaged petroleum facilities.

Several fuel reserves in Russian territory have been the target of apparent intrusions by Ukrainian forces in recent weeks, although Kyiv refuses to confirm its involvement.

In the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine, 14 attacks launched by Russian forces have also been repelled in the past 24 hours, the Ukrainian forces’ general staff said on Saturday.

A senior Pentagon official noted on Friday that if the Russian forces were “far from having made the connection” of the troops entering through the Kharkiv region, north of Donbass, with those coming from the south of the country to take the forces deployed on the front line, they continued “to create the conditions for a sustained, broader and longer offensive”.

On the diplomatic side, President Zelensky met on Saturday in Kyiv with spokesman for the Turkish presidency, Ibrahim Kalin. A member of NATO and an ally of Ukraine, Turkey has been trying since the start of the war to facilitate mediation between Moscow and Kyiv. The content of the discussions was not revealed.