According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, a team of nine workers is attempting to return to the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol after abandoning a previous attempt due to ground circumstances that rendered it hard to proceed.

After a failed attempt on Friday, the humanitarian organisation said a team of three cars was on its way to help facilitate the safe passage of people on Saturday.

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In a late-Friday statement, the group claimed it would try to escort a convoy of residents from Mariupol to another city in Ukraine.

It said that, “our presence will put a humanitarian marker on this planned movement of people, giving the convoy additional protection and reminding all sides of the civilian, humanitarian nature of the operation.”

Mariupol, which was surrounded by Russian forces a month ago, has been the scene of some of the war’s worst attacks, including on a maternity hospital and a theater sheltering civilians. Around 100,000 people are believed to remain in the city, down from a prewar population of 430,000, and facing dire shortages of water, food, fuel and medicine.

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City officials said some 3,000 made it out of Mariupol on Friday, some on buses and some in their own vehicles.

“Today, humanitarian corridors were working in three regions: Donetsk, Lugansk and Zaporizhzhia. We have managed to rescue 6,266 people, including 3,071 people from Mariupol,” Volodymyr Zelensky stated this in a video message delivered early Saturday.

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An AFP correspondent observed over 30 evacuation buses drive into Zaporizhzhia late Friday, some of them carrying individuals who had escaped to Mariupol on their own and were subsequently bused to Ukrainian-controlled territory.