Civilians evacuated from Ukraine’s Mariupol, US Speaker Pelosi visits Kyiv

Around 50 Ukrainian civilians reached the relative safety of a temporary camp in Russian-held territory on Sunday after being evacuated from a ruined steelworks in Mariupol, where the United Nations said a “safe passage operation” was in progress.  

With fighting stretching along a broad front in southern and eastern Ukraine, U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi pledged continued U.S. support for Ukraine when she met President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in an unannounced visit to Kyiv.  

Russia said it had destroyed a stock of Western-supplied weapons at an airfield near Odesa, in southern Ukraine.  
Mariupol, a strategic port city on the Azov Sea, has endured the most destructive siege of the war, with Pope Francis, in an implicit criticism of Russia, telling thousands of people in St Peter’s Square on Sunday it had been “barbarously bombarded”.  

Moscow has turned its focus to Ukraine’s south and east after failing to capture Kyiv in the early weeks of a war that has flattened cities, killed thousands of civilians and forced more than 5 million to flee the country.  

In Mariupol, Russia declared victory on April 21 even as hundreds of holdout Ukrainian troops and civilians took shelter in the city’s Azovstal steel works, a vast Soviet-era complex with a network of bunkers and tunnels, where they have been trapped with little food, water or medicine.  

Footage posted by Zelenskiy on Twitter on Sunday showed him, flanked by an armed escort and dressed in military fatigues, greeting a U.S. Congressional delegation led by Pelosi outside his presidential office the previous day.  

“Our delegation travelled to Kyiv to send an unmistakable and resounding message to the entire world: America stands firmly with Ukraine,” Pelosi, the highest ranking U.S. official to visit Ukraine since Russia invaded on Feb. 24, said in a statement.  
KYIV/BEZIMENNE, Ukraine, May 1 (Reuters)