Civilian evacuations have begun from the Azovstal steel works in Mariupol following a cease-fire, said a commander in the Azov Regiment who is one of the Ukrainian soldiers trapped at the plant, CNN reports.
"As of now, it's the truth, both sides follow the cease-fire regime," said Capt. Svyatoslav Palamar, deputy commander of the Azov Regiment on the regiment's Telegram channel.
The evacuation convoy was delayed more than 12 hours, he said.
"Since 6 a.m., we've been waiting for the evacuation convoy to arrive, which only arrived at 6:25 p.m.," Palamar continued.
"We have brought 20 civilians to the agreed meeting point, whom we've managed to rescue from under the rubble. These are women and children. We hope these people will go the agreed destination, which is Zaporizhzhia, the territory controlled by Ukraine," Palamar said. "As of now, the rescue operation is ongoing, conducted by the servicemen of Azov — we rescue the civilians from under the rubble."
"These are women, children, and the elderly," he said.
"We hope that this process will be further extended and we will successfully evacuate all civilians," he said.
"As for the wounded — those people who require urgent medical care — it is unclear to us why they are not being evacuated and their evacuation to the territory controlled by Ukraine is not being discussed," he added.
"I emphasize that we ask to guarantee the evacuation not just for civilians but also for our wounded servicemen who require medical care."
Russia's state news agency TASS reported 25 people left the plant. Six children under age 14 were among them, according to that report.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said after meeting Zelenskyy in Kyiv on Thursday that intense discussions were under way to enable the evacuation of the Azovstal steel plant, which has been pounded by Russian forces occupying Mariupol.
"We are depending on the goodwill of all parties and we are in this together," United Nations Crisis Coordinator Amin Awad told Reuters.
Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed "in principle" Tuesday to U.N. and International Committee for the Red Cross involvement in evacuating the Azovstal plant.
The Mariupol city council has said about 100,000 residents across the city are "in mortal danger" because of Russian shelling and unsanitary conditions, and described a "catastrophic" shortage of drinking water and food.
Russia declared victory in Mariupol last week, but hundreds of Ukrainian forces remain in the vast industrial complex of the Azovstal steel works. Civilians are also sheltering at the site.
There are up to 1,000 civilians at the Azovstal steelworks, according to Ukrainian officials, who have not said how many fighters remained in the only part of Mariupol not occupied by Russian forces. The Russians put the number of Ukrainian soldiers at the plant at about 2,000.
Video and images shared with The Associated Press by two Ukrainian women who said their husbands are among the fighters there showed wounded men with stained bandages in need of changing; others had open wounds or amputated limbs.
A skeleton medical staff was treating at least 600 wounded people, said the women, who identified their husbands as members of the Azov Regiment of Ukraine's National Guard. Some of the wounds were rotting with gangrene, they said.
In the video the women shared, the wounded men, who are not identified, tell the camera they eat once a day and share as little as 50 ounces of water a day among four. Supplies inside the blockaded are depleting, they said.
The AP could not independently verify the date and location of the footage, which the women said was taken in the last week in the warren of passageways beneath the steel mill.
One shirtless man spoke in obvious pain as he described his wounds: two broken ribs, a punctured lung and a dislocated arm that "was hanging on the flesh."
"I want to tell everyone who sees this. If you will not stop this here, in Ukraine, it will go further, to Europe," he said.
In other developments:
- Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview that Russian and Ukrainian negotiators talk "almost every day." However, he told Chinese state news agency Xinhua that "progress has not been easy."
- A former U.S. Marine was killed while fighting alongside Ukrainian forces, his family said, in what would be the war's first known death of an American in combat. The U.S. has not confirmed the report.
- Two buses that were headed to the town of Popasna in eastern Ukraine to evacuate residents were fired upon, and contact with the drivers was lost, Mayor Nikolai Khanatov said.
- Russian air-defense forces detected a Ukrainian military plane over Russia's Bryansk region and tried to repel the aircraft. Two shells fell on a village, regional Gov. Alexander Bogomaz said. No one was injured, but an oil terminal suffered some damage, Bogomaz said.
Getting a full picture of the unfolding battle in the east has been difficult because airstrikes and artillery barrages have made it extremely dangerous for reporters to move around. Both Ukraine and the Moscow-backed rebels fighting in the east also have introduced tight restrictions on reporting from the combat zone.
But Western military analysts suggested Moscow's offensive in the eastern Donbas region, which includes Mariupol, was going much slower than planned. So far, Russia's troops and the separatist forces Moscow has backed in the region since 2014 appeared to have made only minor gains in the month since Moscow said it would focus its military strength in eastern Ukraine.
Numerically, Russia's military manpower vastly exceeds Ukraine's. In the days before the war began, Western intelligence estimated Russia had positioned near the border as many as 190,000 troops; Ukraine's standing military is about 200,000, spread throughout the country.
In part because of the tenacity of the Ukrainian resistance, the U.S. believes the Russians are "at least several days behind where they wanted to be" as they try to encircle Ukrainian troops in the east, said a senior U.S. defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the American military's assessment.
The British Defense Ministry offered a similar conclusion in its daily assessment of the war, saying it believes Russian forces in Ukraine are likely suffering from "weakened morale," along with a lack of unit-level skills and "inconsistent air support." It did not say on what basis it made the evaluation.
With plenty of firepower still in reserve, Russia's promised offensive still could intensify and overrun the Ukrainians. Overall, the Russian army has an estimated 900,000 active-duty personnel. Russia also has a much larger air force and navy than Ukraine and possesses tactical nuclear weapons.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy acknowledged as much in his nightly address.
"If the Russian invaders succeed in realizing their plans, at least in part, they will still have enough artillery and aircraft to destroy the entire Donbas. Just as they destroyed Mariupol,'' he said.
"The city, which was one of the most developed in the region, is simply a Russian concentration camp in the middle of ruins," Zelenskyy said.
Ukraine has blamed the failure of numerous previous evacuation attempts on continued Russian shelling.
For those who are in steel plant, a vast underground network of tunnels and bunkers has provided safety from airstrikes. But the situation has grown more dire after the Russians dropped "bunker busters" and other bombs on the plant, the mayor said Friday.
The women who said their husbands are in the steel plant as part of the Azov Regiment said they feared soldiers will be tortured and killed if they are left behind and captured by the Russians. They asked for a Dunkirk-style mission to evacuate the fighters, a reference to the World War II operation launched to rescue surrounded Allied troops in northern France.
"We can do this extraction operation ... which will save our soldiers, our civilians, our kids," Kateryna Prokopenko, 27, said, speaking to the AP in Rome. "We need to do this right now, because people — every hour, every second — are dying."
The Azov Regiment helping to defend the steel plant has its roots in the Azov Battalion, which was formed in 2014 by far-right activists at the start of the separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine. Russian officials have referred to the regiment's past while attempting to justify its activities in eastern Ukraine.
Despite the intensity of the fighting in the east, some Ukrainians tried to make their way back to the embattled region, going against the flow of the nearly 5.5 million people who have fled the country since Russia invaded.
"Everything is there. Our roots are there," a 75-year-old man intending to cross the front-line from Zaporizhzhia with his wife to reach his home in Donetsk. "Even people from Mariupol want to go back."
Newsmax's Jack Gournell contributed to this Associated Press report, along with material from Reuters.