Turkey has offered injured Ukrainian fighters water evacuation – Erdogan adviser

NATO member Turkey has proposed evacuating injured fighters holed up in a steel plant in the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol via water, according to President Tayyip Erdogan’s spokesperson on Saturday.

In an interview with Reuters, Ibrahim Kalin said that he personally discussed the plan with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv two weeks ago and that it is still “on the table,” albeit Moscow has not agreed to it.

Under the plan, people evacuated from the vast Azovstal steel plant would be taken by land to the port of Berdyansk, which like Mariupol is on the Sea of Azov, and a Turkish vessel would take them across the Black Sea to Istanbul, he said.

“If it can be done that way, we are happy to do it. We are ready. In fact, our ship is ready to go and bring the injured soldiers and other civilians to Turkey,” said Kalin, who is also Erdogan’s top foreign policy adviser.

Ukraine and Russia did not immediately comment on the possibility of an evacuation by sea.

After weeks of Russian siege and bombardment, Mariupol is in Russian hands, but hundreds of Ukrainian fighters are holding out under heavy fire at the steelworks.

A number of civilians who were sheltering in the plant were evacuated this month with the help of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations. Turkey’s proposal included evacuating the civilians who were still there.

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