Mariupol: Its inhabitants resist refugees and without food in an Azovstal steel mill

Thousands of civilians from the besieged city of Mariupol, on the coast of the sea of ​​Azovresist the continuous bombardments of the Russian troops sheltered in the facilities of the Azovstal steelworks, an old metallurgical plant created in the 1930s.

“Civilians, including women and children, are taking refuge in the facilities of the Azovstal plant,” the Mariupol police chief said on Monday. Mykhailo Vershynin, in statements made on a local television program, according to the Ukrinform agency.

Vershynin made these comments while speaking on the show with the former Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov about the situation in that city, besieged by Russian troops for weeks.

According to Avakov, “there are many people in the Azovstal bunkers: women, elderly, children. All of them (live) in terrible conditions, No medicine, no food, no water.

all these people they have been hiding from the continuous bombing, that have practically destroyed the entire city, in cellars and caves of these ancient blast furnaces.

The former minister denounced that the Russians “to cover up their crimes, they use the remaining civilian population in Mariupol to dig up rubble, collect bodies and dig mass graves.

“People work for the food” they can get from the Russian military, he charged.

Furthermore, “the Russians are forcing civilians to wear a white bandage, on the right leg and left arm, as in the army of the Russian Federation and the so-called ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ (pro-Russian Ukrainian region whose sovereignty has been recognized by Moscow)”.

In this way, force local residents to act as “combatants and they intentionally send them to firing points, where people can die,” added the former minister.

The city of Mariupol came to have a population of half a million inhabitants and today there are only about 100,000 residents left, facing a humanitarian catastrophe, as basic services are not available.

Moscow issued an ultimatum this weekend residents and fighters of the city to surrender, something that Ukraine rejected.