Aid workers prepare stretchers and toys for Mariupol evacuees

People wait to be processed upon arrival at a reception centre for displaced people in Zaporizhzhia (Francisco Seco/AP)

Aid workers were preparing hot food, wheelchairs and toys for civilians slowly making their way to relative safety from the pulverised remnants of a steel plant in the city of Mariupol, besieged for months by Russian forces.

The plant is the last holdout of Ukrainian resistance in a city that is otherwise controlled by Moscow’s forces and key to their campaign in Ukraine’s east.