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Fourteen tons of food and medicine that had been sent to the city of Melitopol were confiscated by Russian forces as a humanitarian corridor was supposed to be open to evacuate Ukrainians stranded from the bombed areas.
The confiscation of humanitarian aid comes at a time when peace talks between Moscow and Kiev will resume on Friday, while evacuation operations are also expected to begin for residents of Mariupol.
A total of 45 buses are on their way to the nearby southern coastal city of Berdyansk, said Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk, along with a team from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) sending humanitarian aid and assisting evacuations. The caravan was expected to enter the city on Friday morning following Russian promises of a limited ceasefire along the road from Mariupol to Zaporizhia
Repeated attempts to set up humanitarian corridors to evacuate the remaining 170,000 people in Mariupol, which has suffered four weeks of intense bombardment and cut-off supplies, have failed.
Ukraine has accused Russian forces of bombing allegedly safe roads outside some battlefields, claims Moscow denies.
Deputy Prime Minister Vereshchuk said about 45,000 Mariupol residents had been forcibly relocated to Russia and Russian-backed separatist areas of eastern Ukraine.
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