About 100 civilians are still trapped in the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, Ukrainian officials said , despite reports that everyone had been evacuated.
Donetsk regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said in televised remarks on Tuesday that those left behind are civilians who “the Russians do not have selected”.
“How and based on what criteria they remove people (from the plant) is something that only the occupants know”, said Kyrylenko.
He said that everyone in Mariupol is “de facto hostage of the Russians, and the occupiers take advantage of this, constantly changing the conditions of the evacuation”.
Petro Andryushchenko, adviser to the mayor of Mariupol, also said that civilians they remain trapped in the Azovstal factory, which is the last pocket of resistance in the conflicting port city.
It was not immediately clear how the two officials knew about the remaining civilians at the Azovstal plant and the combatants have not yet confirmed it.
Hundreds of civilians had taken refuge in the plant.
Dozens of them have been evacuated in recent days in a joint effort by the Ukrainian authorities, the Russian army, the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
On Saturday, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said that all women, children and the elderly have been evacuated from Azovstal.
Mariupol, a port city on the Sea of Azov, is a key target due to its strategic location near the peninsula of Crimea, which Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014.
Mariupol has seen some of the worst suffering.
A maternity hospital was hit in a deadly airstrike in the first weeks of the war, and it was reported that some 300 people were killed in the bombing of a theater where civilians took refuge.
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