Mayor of Mariupol, Vadym Boychenko, has insisted that the lives of people stuck in the shattered city are in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hands.
Boychenko said this while expressing his frustration at the rate of the evacuation from Mariupol since the beginning of the war between Ukraine and Russia.
The mayor said that Russia has “undermined this evacuation,” which they started in “the first days of March.”
“They asked us to give them a map of where the evacuation will start from – we gave them the map,” Boychenko told Reuters news agency.
“[They asked] how many buses do you have? We gave the number of buses.
“And they destroyed and demolished all of those places, they destroyed our buses.”
He added: “It’s important to understand that the lives that are still there [in Mariupol], they are in the hands of just one person – Vladimir Putin.”
Earlier, the Ukrainian side had proposed negotiations on the fate of the fighters and the rescue of civilians who had sought refuge in the factory.
The war between Russia and Ukraine started in February this year and many casualties have already been recorded.
Putin had ordered the invasion of Ukraine due to political differences between both neighbouring nations.
