On May 1, Russia’s Defense Ministry reported that the evacuation of civilians from the Azovstal plant in the city of Mariupol had begun.
The ministry claimed Russian President Vladimir Putin had initiated the evacuation and that Ukrainian troops in the plant were holding the civilians as hostages:
“Thanks to President of the Russian Federation V.V. Putin’s initiative, 80 civilians, including women and children, held by the Ukrainian nationalists have been rescued from the territory of the Azovstal factory in Mariupol.”
Those claims are false.
The evacuation of civilians from the Azovstal plant was initiated by United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who proposed the plan to Putin at a meeting in Moscow on April 26.
According to the U.N., Putin “agreed in principle” to allow the U.N. and the International Red Cross to participate in the rescue of the Ukrainians trapped at Azovstal.
The U.N.-negotiated safe corridors are meant to give the evacuees the choice of whether to be transported to Ukraine-controlled territory or to the Russian-controlled parts of eastern Ukraine's Donbas region.
Russia does not give evacuees that choice but sends people to so-called filtration camps in Donbas to be deported to rural areas in Russia.
Guterres also met with the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to negotiate the conditions for a humanitarian corridor, and then traveled to Kyiv to finalize the deal with the Ukrainian side, already desperate to save the people at...
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