Russia’s defense ministry issued an ultimatum late Sunday to those people who remain hunkered down in the besieged eastern Ukrainian port city of Mariupol.
“We have already informed the Russian side about this,” she was quoted as saying by Ukrainska Pravda,As it stands, Mizintsev stated in his address that as many as 130,000 civilians are being “held hostage” in the port city, but they will be released to evacuate either east or west if Kyiv accepts the terms by the 5 a.m. Moscow time deadline.
Previous efforts to evacuate civilians from Mariupol quickly broke down when Russia resumed shelling, driving thousands of residents underground, where they have scarce access to food, water and medical supplies,Meanwhile, Mariupol’s city council warned Saturday that thousands of the city’s residents are being forcibly deported to Russia,“What the occupiers are doing today is familiar to the older generation, who saw the horrific events of World War II, when the Nazis forcibly captured people,”...
“It is difficult to imagine that in the 21st century people will be forcibly deported to another country. Not only are Russian troops destroying our peaceful Mariupol, they have gone even further and started deporting Mariupol residents,” Boychenko added. Mariupol’s city council members said several thousand residents were captured in a sports hall where they had been sheltering and taken to “filtration camps,” where their phones and documents were inspected before they were dispatched to remote Russian cities,Meanwhile, Pavlo Kyrylenko, the governor of Donetsk, said Sunday in a video shared to YouTube that he had learned of about 1,000 people who had been forced into Russia, the newspaper reported.
The claims about Ukrainians being forcibly deported could not be independently verified Sunday by the