‘Practically all people’ have been taken out of Mariupol’s Azovstal steelworks, said Ukraine’s president in an interview for UA Razom on Friday.

As the exit operation is still underway,  Volodymyr Zelensky said he can’t provide more details on it.

He admitted the evacuation effort proved to be very hard but it eventually worked thanks to Ukraine’s western partners.

‘I negotiated [the evacuation] with Turkey, Switzerland, Israel,’ said Zelensky, noting the earlier attempts involving a mediation of Emmanuel Marcron fell through.

Zelensky said that Ukrainian defenders of Mariupol are ‘absolutely heroic men’ who were given a ‘signal’ by the Ukrainian military leadership they had a right to exit the Azovstal site to save their lives.