more than 260 wounded soldiers from the
azerb-style steel works on the edge of
the ukrainian city of mariupol have been
evacuated they've been holding out
against a russian offensive for nearly
three months gaining almost legendary
status among many ukrainians in the
process
well this map created by britain's
ministry of defense shows what it says
are the latest front lines the dark pink
shaded area showing parts of ukraine
which have been taken by russian troops
if you look down to the right to bottom
there you can see mariupola key port on
the sea of azov deep inside that
russian-held area effectively cut off
from other ukrainian forces
well these latest pictures suggest that
the soldiers
in the as of style plant were bust out
and have now reached novozovsk which is
a russian-controlled town in eastern
ukraine at least 50 of the soldiers are
said to have been taken to local
hospitals there it's not clear at this
stage if they will be released into
ukrainian government hands
ukrainian president vladimir zelinsky
has stressed the importance of their
release
we hope to save the lives of our boys
among them are the heavily wounded they
are being treated
i want to underline ukraine needs its
ukrainian heroes alive this is our
principle i think these words can be
understood by all adequate people
let's get the latest now from joe inward
who joins us from la viv uh joe is this
effectively the end of the siege of
mariopo
uh i'm not sure we can say that for
certain yet we do know that there are we
certainly suspect that there are
soldiers still inside it may be that
some have decided they'd had enough and
you can understand why but some have
decided that they are going to stay and
fight maybe because they are the members
for example of the azov battalion who
feared they would not receive anything
approaching fair treatment so i think
until we have confirmation that every
single soldier is out of that complex i
think we can say we can't say that the
battle is completely over but i think
this does represent a a marked shift in
the conflict
who brokered the evacuation and what
sort of attention are these soldiers
being given and indeed monitored in
terms of how they're going to be treated
by russian forces
i think it's worth saying at the start
that this has all happened rather under
a shroud of secrecy we haven't been
given a running commentary on the
negotiations to get them out we
understand from what president zelinski
said however that as well as the
ukrainians the russians and their
intelligence services the united nations
and the red cross were involved in this
as they were in the two previous
evacuations from mario
now we understand that they are
monitoring everything that's going on
how much independent monitoring they can
do we don't know exactly what access
they're getting again we don't know but
they have been involved in previous
evacuations and those have seemed to
take place successfully although as we
say all of this is being done
slightly behind closed doors i think to
try and probably keep the negotiations
going smoothly rather than having them
disrupted by leaks of information are we
any clearer joe about the counter
offensive because we've heard in recent
days that ukrainian forces are now on
the russian border effectively very
close to haruki what's happening
elsewhere
yeah i think it's fair to say that
whilst the russians have clearly come
close to winning the battle for mario
pole they might be losing the wider war
that's certainly the assessment that
we're getting from from analysts and
from the intelligence that we're seeing
up in arkiv as you mentioned this is
ukraine's second city
we've seen a counter-offensive we've
seen ukrainian forces pushing russian
forces back and yesterday indeed there
was a video that was released i'm sure
people will have seen this of ukrainian
forces carrying a big yellow and blue
striped post to the border to reimpose
their post on the internationally
recognized border they sent a message to
the president president zielinski saying
we are here we've done it so yeah we are
seeing these ukrainian
counter-offensives even pushing russian
forces back across the sovereign donetsk
river around donetsk and
holding the line in isiam so i think the
general pattern although it's it's
varied in different places the general
pattern is that the russians seem to be
struggling they're losing a lot of
forces and the ukrainians are trying to
push them back where they can okay joe
and we'll put the latest in la viv thank
you very much indeed well