Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereschuk on Saturday claimed that several humanitarian corridors including from Mariupol to Zaporizhzhia are open on Saturday, according to ANI.
There was no independent verification.
"We are opening the next humanitarian routes that will work in the following directions: from Mariupol in Donetsk region - in the direction of Zaporizhia ... with mandatory clearance along the entire route. A convoy with humanitarian cargo and buses to Mariupol will leave Zaporizhia. We expect and hope that the route will work today," Vereschuk said at a briefing on Friday.
Vereschuk also said that on Friday the green corridor from Volnovakha, Donetsk region, in the direction of Pokrovsk, will also start working.
Earlier, Ukraine said on Friday the situation in Mariupol was now critical as Russian forces tightened their noose around the Black Sea port city and the death toll from Russian shelling and a 12-day blockade reached almost 1,600.
Russia's defence ministry was quoted by the Tass news agency as saying Mariupol was now completely surrounded, and Ukrainian officials accused Russia of deliberately preventing civilians getting out and stopping humanitarian convoys getting in.
Russian shelling prevented evacuees from leaving the city again on Friday. Elsewhere, Russian forces also stopped some buses of people trying to flee the Kyiv region, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said in a video address.
Interior ministry adviser Vadym Denysenko expressed doubt that the latest attempt to deliver humanitarian aid to Mariupol would succeed, and a new effort to evacuate civilians appeared to have failed.
The scale of the destruction in the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol has been revealed in a series of photos and satellite images.
Residential areas have been flattened, a shopping centre destroyed and a maternity hospital attacked. The southern port city has used at least one mass grave to bury the dead.
Mariupol, a city of about 400,000, has been subjected to days of heavy bombardment.
Its people are running dangerously short of food and water, the city's deputy mayor Sergei Orlov, says, and there is "no electricity, no water supply, no heating, no sanitary system".
People are being forced to melt snow to drink, and chop wood to cook and keep warm in sub-zero temperatures, he says.
Mariupol is a key strategic target for Russia. Seizing it would allow Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine to join forces with troops in Crimea - the southern peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.
