Kyiv has reached a preliminary agreement with Russia on creating a humanitarian corridor to evacuate women, children, and the elderly from the besieged city of Mariupol on April 20, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said.
"We managed to pre-agree a humanitarian corridor for women, children and older people," she wrote on Facebook. "Given the catastrophic humanitarian situation in Mariupol, this is where we will focus our efforts today."
Vereshchuk said the attempted evacuation would start at 2 p.m. local time.
The column will move along the Mariupol-Zaporizhzhya route, Vereshchuk said.
Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko said authorities hope to evacuate 6,000 people from the city in 90 buses.
About 100,000 civilians are still in the besieged city, Boychenko said on national television on April 20, adding that tens of thousands have been killed.
A previous agreement to establish a safe corridor to evacuate civilians from Mariupol collapsed on March 5. Since then, repeated attempts to create a humanitarian corridor have failed, with each side blaming the other.
