Zaporizhia, Ukraine (AP) – Russia plans to include large parts of eastern Ukraine by the end of the month, a senior U.S. official warned, and the Mariupol steel plant, the city’s last stronghold of resistance, is back from the first day. Evacuation of civilians from the plant.
Michael Carpenter, the U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said Monday that the U.S. believes the Kremlin also recognizes the southern city of Kherson as an independent republic. No moves will be recognized by the United States or its allies, he said.
Russia plans to hold fraudulent referendums in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which “will try to impose a layer of democratic or electoral legitimacy” and include subjects in Russia, Carpenter said. He also said there were signs that Russia would build an engineering Independence Vow in Kherson.
Local mayors and lawmakers were abducted there, the internet and cell phones were cut off, and a Russian school curriculum was about to be established, Carpenter said. The Ukrainian government claims that Russia introduced the ruble as its currency.
More than 100 people, including elderly women and young mothers, left the dilapidated Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol on Sunday and traveled by bus and ambulance to the Ukraine -controlled city of Zaporizhia, about 230 kilometers to the north. -East. Mariupol Deputy Mayor Sergei Orlov told the BBC that the evacuees were moving slowly.
Authorities did not comment on the delay.
It appears that at least part of the civilian population has been relocated to a village controlled by Russian -backed separatists. The Russian military says some have chosen to remain in separatist areas, while dozens have moved to Ukrainian-controlled territory.
In the past, Ukraine has accused Moscow troops of bringing civilians against their will into Russia or Russian -controlled territories. The Kremlin has denied this.
The bombing in Russia resumed after a large aircraft, tank and ship factory partially evacuated, Ukraine’s Azov battalion, which helps protect the facility, said in a Telegram messaging app.
Orlov said high-level talks were underway between Ukraine, Russia and other international organizations to evacuate more people.
The steel mill evacuation, if successful, is a rare advance in mitigating human costs in the nearly 10-week war that has caused special suffering in Mariupol. Previous attempts to open safe corridors from the southern port city and elsewhere have failed, with Ukrainian officials blaming Russian forces for agreed evacuation routes of gunfire and shelling.
Prior to the weekend evacuation, which was controlled by the United Nations and the Red Cross, about 1,000 civilians and about 2,000 Ukrainian defenders were present at the plant who refused Russia’s request for surrender.
Up to 100,000 people are still found in Mariupol, where the pre -war population was over 400,000. Russian forces destroyed much of the city, leaving civilians stranded with little food, water, heat or medicine.
Some Mariupol residents were left alone, often with damaged private vehicles.
At sunset, Mariupol resident Yaroslav Dmitryshin went to the living room in Zaporizhia with a car full of young people in the back seat and two signs in the rear window: “children” and “small ones”.
“I don’t think we survived,” he said, faded but in good spirits, two days later.
“There is no Mariupol,” he said. “Someone has to rebuild it and it will cost millions of tons of gold.” He said they live on the railroad tracks of a steel mill. “It’s broken,” he said. “The factory is completely gone.”
Anastasia Dembitska, who took advantage of the ceasefire and left with her son, grandson and dog, said she was looking out the window at a steel mill when she dared to look.
“We saw rockets flying” and clouds of smoke over the factory, he said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told Greek state television that citizens who remained at the steel plant were afraid to board buses for fear of being taken to Russia. He said the UN had assured them that they could travel to areas controlled by his government.
Mariupol is located in the Donbas, the eastern industrial center of Ukraine, and the main rural area of Russia in the East. Its acquisition would take up an important port for Ukraine, allow Russia to build a land corridor on the Crimean peninsula, which it took from Ukraine in 2014, and free troops fighting elsewhere.
According to the state news agency TASS, more than 1 million people, including nearly 200,000 children, have been evacuated from Ukraine to Russia, the Russian defense ministry said on Monday.
Defense Ministry spokesman Mikhail Mizintsev said the number included 11,550 people, including 1,847 children, in the past 24 hours, “without the participation of Ukrainian authorities”.
According to the report, these civilians were “evacuated from the dangerous regions of Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics on the territory of the Russian Federation” and from other parts of Ukraine. Details not provided.
Zelensky said Monday that at least 220 Ukrainian children have been killed by the Russian military since the war began, while 1,570 educational institutions have been destroyed or damaged.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, unable to seize the capital Kiev, has turned his attention to Donbass, where Moscow -backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian forces since 2014.
Russia said it had hit dozens of military targets in the region, including a concentration of troops and weapons and an ammunition depot near Chervon in the Zaporizhia region west of the Donbas.
Ukrainian and Western officials said Moscow troops were indiscriminate in firing, killing many civilians, while only slowly advancing.
On the Black Sea coast, Odessa region governor Maxim Marchenko said in a telegram that he had been killed and wounded in a Russian missile attack on Monday. Details not named. Zelensky said the attack destroyed a dormitory and killed a 14-year-old boy.
Ukraine said Russia had also hit a strategic road and railway bridge west of Odessa. The bridge was severely damaged in previous Russian attacks and its destruction cut off the supply of weapons and other cargo from neighboring Romania.
However, satellite images taken by Planet Labs PBC and analyzed by the Associated Press showed that the bridge was still standing on Monday afternoon.
The second photo taken on Monday shows nearly 50 Russian military helicopters at Stary Oskol, a Russian base near the Ukrainian border and 175 kilometers (110 miles) northeast of the Ukrainian city of Kharkov.
Helicopters were deployed differently on the runway and on the lawn of the civilian airport, with military equipment.
In the war in Ukraine, Russia flew to the ground using military attack helicopters to avoid anti-aircraft missiles.
Reported by Varenicia from Kiev, Ukraine. Associated Press reporters Jessica Fish in Slovyansk, John Gambrel and Yura Karmanau in Lviv, Mstislav Chernov in Kharkov, Lolita Baldor in Washington, and AP staff around the world contributed to this report.
Source: Huffpost
