
Ukraine’s interior ministry advisor Vadym Denysenko said on Wednesday that around 20,000 civilians have successfully left the city of Mariupol in private cars.
The residents of the port city were trapped without electricity and running water for the past two weeks due to heavy shelling from the Russian forces and were in need of urgent evacuation, according to the Ukrainian officials.
Of these cars, 570 have arrived in the city of Zaporizhzhia to the northwest, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's deputy chief of staff Kyrylo Tymoshenko said on Telegram.
Those in the remaining cars were forced to spend the night along the route, Tymoshenko added.
According to an AFP report, city officials believe that more than 2100 residents have been killed in Mariupol since the beginning of the Russian invasion and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said that it was not able to deliver aid to the city amid the ‘dire situation’.
"The bottom line is that hundreds of thousands of people are still suffering," the ICRC said.
Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said that altogether, nearly 29,000 people managed to use humanitarian corridor to flee the city on Tuesday.
"Neutral status is now being seriously discussed along, of course, with security guarantees," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said told RBC news. "Now this very thing is being discussed in negotiations - there are absolutely specific formulations which in my view are close to an agreement," he added.
(With agency inputs)