Mariupol evacuation “thwarted” by Russian military

An advisor to the mayor of Mariupol, Petro Andriushchenko, said on Saturday that the evacuation of civilians has been thwarted by the Russian military.

200 residents were gathered near a shopping mall in the besieged city, waiting to be evacuated to Zaporizhzhia.

At 11 a.m., the evacuation was about to begin, when the Russian military ordered the residents to leave.

They commanded them to leave, and said, ‘there will be shelling now.”

Initially, the Russian military brought buses to a different location, which was 200 meters away from the agreed evacuation point.

Once the residents were loaded on the buses, they were told they’ll be evacuated to the Dokuchaevsk region.

“People were not given the right to leave the bus. When asked why, the answer was ‘nationalists fired on the evacuation point.’ That is another lie,” Andriushchenko said.

Once again the Russians obstructed the evacuation.

They exploited Mariupol civilians’ efforts to return home, and the Ukrainian army’s honesty in a ceasefire to prepare their own schemes.

Ukraine’s parliament also pronounced the evacuation as “disrupted.”

“About 200 Mariupol residents were going to leave, but when they arrived at the assembly point, the [Russian] military told them to disperse because ‘there will be shelling now’,” the official account tweeted.