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Kyiv/Bezimenne: Around 100 Ukrainian civilians were being evacuated from a ruined steelworks in the city of Mariupol on Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said, after the United Nations had confirmed a “safe passage operation” was in progress there.
Mariupol, a strategic port city on the Azov Sea, has endured the most destructive siege of the war, with Pope Francis, in an implicit criticism of Russia, telling thousands of people in St Peter’s Square on Sunday it had been “barbarously bombarded”.
“Grateful to our team! Now they, together with (United Nations), are working on the evacuation of other civilians from the plant,” Zelensky tweeted. The evacuees would reach the Ukrainian-controlled city of Zaporizhzhia on Monday, he said.
With fighting stretching along a broad front in southern and eastern Ukraine, US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi pledged continued US support for Ukraine when she met Zelensky in an unannounced visit to Kyiv. Russia, meanwhile, said it had destroyed a stock of Western-supplied weapons at an airfield near Odessa, in southern Ukraine.
In Mariupol, Russia declared victory on April 21 even as hundreds of holdout Ukrainian troops and civilians took shelter in the city’s Azovstal steel works, where they have been trapped with little food, water or medicine. Negotiations to evacuate the civilians had repeatedly broken down in recent weeks, with Russia and Ukraine blaming each other.
But on Sunday, more than 50 civilians arrived at a temporary accommodation centre after escaping from Mariupol, a Reuters photographer said.
The civilians arrived on buses at the Russian-held village of Bezimenne, around 30km, east of Mariupol.
US stands with Ukraine
Footage posted by Zelensky on Twitter on Sunday showed him, flanked by an armed escort and dressed in military fatigues, greeting a US Congressional delegation led by Pelosi outside his presidential office the previous day.
Also Read | US Speaker Nancy Pelosi latest foreign diplomat to meet Zelensky in Kyiv
“Our delegation travelled to Kyiv to send an unmistakable and resounding message to the entire world: America stands firmly with Ukraine,” Pelosi, the highest ranking US official to visit Ukraine since Russia invaded on February 24, said.
Rouble introduced
Russia has moved to solidify its grip on areas it controls and from Sunday introduced the Russian rouble in the region of Kherson – initially to be used alongside the Ukrainian hryvnia. “Beginning May 1, we will move to the ruble zone,” Kirill Stremousov, a civilian and military administrator of Kherson, was cited as saying earlier by Russia’s state news agency RIA Novosti.
He said there would be a period of four months in which the hryvnia could be used, but then “we will completely switch to settlements in roubles”.
Ukraine’s military said in a bulletin on Sunday that Russian forces were fighting to push north from Kherson to the cities of Mykolayiv and Kryvyi Rih.
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