These Evacuated Civilians Were Not Actually Inside Azovstal

There’s a headline going around that civilians were evacuated “from Azovstal.”

They were actually in an adjacent residential area, which is a part of the Azovstal complex, but is not part of the tunnel system that Azov is still holed up in.

RT:

Forty-six civilians were evacuated from residential buildings adjacent to the Azovstal plant in Mariupol on Saturday, the Russian Defense Ministry said.

A video released by the military on Sunday shows people leaving in buses marked with the ‘Z’ symbol. Ambulances can also be seen.

“On April 30, due to the establishment of a ceasefire and the opening of a humanitarian corridor, two groups of civilians left the residential buildings adjacent to the territory of the Azovstal steel plant,” the Defense Ministry said in a statement.

It specified that 25 local residents left the site during the day and 21 left later.

“All civilians were provided with accommodation, food and the necessary medical assistance,” the ministry said.

We have not heard anything in ten days about what is going on in the actual Azovstal tunnels.

At some point, these people are all going to starve to death. The media was going nuts talking about how there were civilians that – for some unexplained reason – followed retreating Banderaist fighters into the tunnel complex. That is probably because these civilians are being eaten by Azov fighters. It’s the same reason they deleted that Ukraine person influencer’s video of him engaging in cannibalism.

Cannibalism is bad optics.

Also, this whole thing is just really bad optics – when you’re surrounded like this, the logic is to surrender. If you want to make some kind of “Alamo” stand, okay – but the defenders of the Alamo did not have a bunch of human shields. There is no reason not to let these people out (if they were even there in the first place, which hasn’t been proved).

Also, the defenders of the Alamo died fighting, not starving in tunnels. I guess starving to death is “brave” in the sense that it is something that takes a lot of nerve, but it’s hardly what we think of as military bravery and it is definitely not heroic in any way. If they want to go down in a blaze of glory, they should come out and play with the Chechens.

This evacuation gave us a new round of videos of civilians saying Azov was using them as human shields.

The Ukrainians are claiming all of these people are lying, or that the videos are staged using actors. Well, why has Ukraine or the US not produced one single interview of anyone freed by Azov who is saying Azov was really nice and helpful?

If these videos are all fakers and liars, why not just talk to the real Mariupol evacuees, and have them clear things up?