Russia denies assault on Ukraine steel facility amid civilian evacuation

Russia is denying reports that its military is storming the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, the Ukrainian military’s last holdout in the city.

Ukraine reported that Russia started a “powerful” assault on the facility Wednesday morning, reports the Kremlin immediately denied, according to the Agence France Presse. Some Ukrainian civilians were able to evacuate from the steel plant during a brief ceasefire this weekend, but it is unclear how many remain there.

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Mariupol has suffered near-constant shelling since the outset of Russia’s invasion in late February. The city is now largely unrecognizable, and Ukrainian forces have been pushed back to the steel facility.

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Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boichenko sounded the alarm on the civilian evacuations Tuesday. He said the majority of those evacuated have in fact been refugees from other cities, not Mariupol residents.

“The previous evacuation, which took place yesterday, which was presented by a number of media outlets as information that those were the residents of Mariupol who left, is not true. These people who were evacuated had nothing to do with the residents of Mariupol, they are from other cities,” Boichenko said.

The mayor went on to say that the evacuation of actual Mariupol residents is likely to take more than a month.

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“We are currently looking forward to the arrival of Mariupol residents in Zaporizhzhya,” he said. “One has to have a certificate to leave the city either to the territory controlled by Ukraine or Russia. People can wait a month or more to obtain such a certificate. It’s just a jeer. The occupiers are especially picky about civil servants and municipal employees. People are arrested and kept in inhumane conditions, in very cramped rooms.”