Around 20,000 evacuated from Ukraine's besieged Mariupol: Official

Around 20,000 people managed to leave Ukraine's besieged port city of Mariupol on Tuesday by driving along a humanitarian corridor agreed with Russian forces, a Ukrainian presidential aide said.

"Today around 20,000 people drove out of Mariupol in private cars along the humanitarian corridor," President Volodymyr Zelensky's deputy chief of staff Kyrylo Tymoshenko said on Telegram.

Of these cars, 570 have arrived in the city of Zaporizhzhia to the northwest, Tymoshenko said.

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Those in the remaining cars will spend the night along the route, he said.

Drivers can only make slow progress due to damaged roads, mines and checkpoints.

Earlier Tuesday, the authorities said that some 2,000 civilian cars had been able to drive out of the city.

A first group of 160 cars left Mariupol on Monday, the city council said.

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The successful evacuations come after several failed attempts since Russian forces surrounded the port city on the Azov Sea early this month.

Heavy bombardment has left some 400,000 inhabitants with no running water or heating and food running short.

More than 2,100 residents have been killed in Mariupol since the Russian invasion, according to city authorities.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said Tuesday the situation in Mariupol "remains dire" and that it was not able to deliver aid to the city.

"The bottom line is that hundreds of thousands of people are still suffering," the ICRC said.

Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said that altogether, nearly 29,000 people managed to use humanitarian routes to flee encircled cities on Tuesday.

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