The Greek Consul General in Mariupol Manolis Androulakis arrived in Athens on Sunday evening (local time), following a high-risk operation to evacuate him. The humanitarian corridor for the evacuation begun on Tuesday with many delays.
Mr Androulakis arrived in Greece by plane from Bucharest after evacuating the city of Mariupol. After he left Mariupol on 15 March, he traveled for four days through Ukraine until he crossed to Romania through Moldavia, along with four Greek citizens and six ethnic Greeks from Ukraine, Kathimerini reported.
Upon arriving at the Athens International Airport ‘Eleftherios Venizelos’, Mr Androulakis said the priority is for other countries to press Russia for a ceasefire “because at this time, civilians are being hit in a haphazard and uncontrollable way.”
Mr Androulakis was welcomed at the airport by his wife, young son, his father, and Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Andreas Katsaniotis. Also present was Foreign Minister Secretary General Themistoklis Demiris.
Describing his harrowing experience, he said the Ukrainian civilians were “watching body parts being collected” in the streets.
“Mariupol will become an entry on a list of cities destroyed by war,” he noted, “as all infrastructure was destroyed within 24 hours. Mariupol is Guernica, Grozny, Velingrad, Aleppo.”
“I have been dealing with Russia for 20 years…what is happening is a tragedy both for the Ukrainian and the Russian people…At this moment, non-combatants are being struck, blindly and without restraint…They are at a standstill militarily and, as long as this is happening, unarmed civilians are going to be hit, Androulakis added, pleading for a ceasefire to evacuate civilians and protect lives.
“Within 24 hours, everything [in Mariupol] was hit, all infrastructure was lost,” Androulakis said, adding that the many ethnic Greeks living in the city are suffering.
Greek diplomats in Ukraine tried to rescue as many members of the Greek minority in the country as possible with him being the last European diplomat remaining in the Mariupol region and said he had been working to aid the diaspora up to the moment he left, ANA-MPA reported.
Thanking the Greek president, the Prime Minister, the Foreign Affairs Ministers, the Greek consul general in Odessa, and secretary generals at other ministries that aided his return, Mr Androulakis also thanked Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky and his officials who helped in the evacuation, the Ukrainian embassy in Athens, the OSCE group that he travelled with, and two unknown families that hosted him on the way out of Ukraine.
