More than 100 women and children were evacuated from a Soviet-era steel plant in Mariupol where Russian bombs have rained down for two months.

For the first time during the invasion of the port city, a two-day ceasefire is being managed, President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed over the weekend.

Footage released online by the controversial Azov Regiment yesterday shows mums with small children and elderly women holed up at the Azovstal steel plant climbing over a steep pile of debris and rubble.

As part of the United Nations-led evacuation, they were boarded onto buses and taken to the Ukrainian-controlled city of Zaporizhzhia, some 141 miles away.

Natalia Usmanova, 37, was one of the people being rescued. ‘You just can’t imagine what we have been through – the terror,’ she told the Guardian.

‘I lived there, worked there all my life, but what we saw there was just terrible.

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‘I feared that the bunker would not withstand it – I had terrible fear.

‘When the bunker started to shake, I was hysterical, my husband can vouch for that. I was so worried the bunker would cave in.’

Civilians fleeing Russian-occupied areas have previously described their vehicles being fired upon.

Officials have repeatedly accused Vladimir Putin’s forces of shelling agreed evacuation routes.

In a video address shared on Telegram, President Zelensky said: ‘Today we finally managed to start the evacuation of people from Azovstal.

As many as 100,000 people may still be in Mariupol. The estimates include 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers beneath the sprawling steel plant – the only part of the city not occupied by the Russians.

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