DPR police officers provide road safety near the point of assistance to the evacuees. File photoMOSCOW, March 12There is no progress in ensuring the work of the humanitarian corridor in Mariupol, said the head of the DPR, Denis Pushilin. «Unfortunately, no. All the actions of the Kiev regime are to block, that is, any possibility of the exit of civilians, plus this is duplicated by neo-Nazi formations. I'm talking about Mariupol, in in particular… In Mariupol, these are people who either break out on their own in the literal sense of the word, or they are put up as human shields and our units then evacuate them. But this is contrary to the agreements on humanitarian corridors,» he said on Channel One.
Pushilin called Mariupol the hottest spot after VolnovakhaOn March 11, Eduard Basurin, a representative of the People's Militia of the DPR, said that its forces occupied the city of Volnovakha between Donetsk and Mariupol. According to the headquarters of the territorial defense of the DPR, on March 12, the army of the republic took control of 85 settlements on the territory of the former Donetsk region. At the time of the proclamation of the DPR in 2014, Mariupol, with a population of about 450 thousand people, was the second largest city in the republic after Donetsk. However, in June of that year, the Ukrainian security forces regained control of Mariupol, and its eastern suburbs became one of the hottest places of conflict in Ukraine. On March 7, Alexander Semyonov, deputy commander of the Vostok battalion of the DPR, said that the largest city on the Azov coast was completely surrounded, and a cleansing of its individual areas had begun. The nationalist regiment «Azov» is located in Mariupol, against whose fighters a criminal case has been initiated in the Russian Federation. Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine on February 24. President Vladimir Putin called its goal «the protection of people who have been subjected to bullying and genocide by the Kiev regime for eight years.» For this, according to him, it is planned to carry out «demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine», to bring to justice all war criminals responsible for «bloody crimes against civilians» in Donbass. According to the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, the Armed Forces strike only at the military infrastructure and Ukrainian troops. With the support of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, the DPR and LPR groups are developing an offensive. But there is no question of the occupation of Ukraine, the President of Russia emphasized.
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