Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has hailed the start of a long-awaited effort to evacuate people from a steel plant in the city of Mariupol, which got under way on Sunday.
The operation to bring people out of the sprawling Azovstal steel plant was being done with the International Committee for the Red Cross and in co-ordination with Ukrainian and Russian officials, the UN said earlier. As many as 100,000 people are believed to be in blockaded Mariupol still, including up to 1,000 civilians who were hunkered down with an estimated 2,000 Ukrainian fighters beneath the Soviet-era steel plant – the only part of the city not occupied by the Russians.
In his nightly address on Sunday, Zelensky said: "Today we finally managed to start the evacuation of people from Azovstal. After many weeks of negotiations, after many attempts, different meetings, people, calls, countries, proposals. Finally! There was not a single day when we did not try to find a solution that would save our people."
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