They've been holding hours against a Russian offensive for nearly three months, gaining almost legendary status among many Ukrainians in the process.

Well, this map created by Britain's Ministry of Defense shows what it says are the latest front lines, the dark pink shaded area showing parts of Ukraine which had been taken by Russian troops.

If you look down to the right to bottom there, you can see Maria Paula key ports on the sea of as of deep inside that Russian held area effectively cut off from other Ukrainian forces.

Well, these latest pictures suggest that the soldiers in the scalp plants were bust out and have now reached Novoazovsk which is a Russian-controlled town in eastern Ukraine.

At least 50 of the soldiers are said to have been taken to local hospitals there.

It's not clear at this stage if they will be released into Ukrainian government hands.

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has stressed the importance of their release.

We hope to save the lives of our boys.

Among them are the heavily wounded, they are being treated.

I want to underline Ukraine needs its Ukrainian heroes alive.

This is our principal, I think these words can be understood by all adequate people.

Let's get the latest now from joe inward.

Who joins us from LVIV joe is this effectively the end of the siege of Mario Puzo.

I'm not sure we can say that for certain yet.

We do know that there are.

We certainly suspect that there are soldiers still inside.

It may be that some have decided they'd had enough and you can understand why but some have decided that they are going to stay and fight.

Maybe because they are the members, for example, of the assault battalion who feared they would not receive anything approaching fair treatment.

So I think until we have confirmation that every single soldier is out of that complex, I think we can say we can't say that the battle is completely over.

But I think this does represent a marked shift in the conflict.

Who brokered the evacuation and what sort of attention are these soldiers being given and indeed monitored in terms of how they're going to be treated by Russian forces.

I think it's worth saying at the start that this has all happened rather under a shroud of secrecy.

We haven't been given a running commentary on the negotiations to get them out.

We understand from what President Zelensky said however, that as well as the Ukrainians, the Russians and their intelligence services, the United Nations and the Red Cross were involved in this as they were in the two previous evacuations from Mariupol.

Now we understand that they are monitoring everything that's going on how much independent monitoring they can do.

We don't know exactly what access they're getting again, we don't know, but they have been involved in previous evacuations and those have seemed to take place successfully.

Although as we say, all of this is being done slightly behind closed doors I think to try and probably keep the negotiations going smoothly rather than having them disrupted by leaks of information.

Are we any clearer joe about the counter offensive?

Because we've heard in recent days that Ukrainian forces are now on the Russian border, effectively very close to heart, Kiev.

What's happening elsewhere?

Yeah, I think it's fair to say that whilst the Russians have clearly come close to winning the battle for Mario pole, they might be losing the wider war.

That's certainly the assessment that we're getting from from analysts and from the intelligence that we're seeing up in Kharkiv.

As you mentioned, this is Ukraine's second city.

We've seen a counter offensive, We've seen Ukrainian forces pushing Russian forces back and yesterday indeed, there was a video that was released.

I'm sure people will have seen this of Ukrainian forces carrying a big yellow and blue striped post to the border to reimpose their post on the internationally recognized border.

They sent a message to the President, President Zelensky saying, we are here, we've done it.

So yeah, we are seeing these Ukrainian counter offensives even pushing Russian forces back across the stravinsky Donets River around Donetsk and holding the line is busy.

Um So I think the general pattern, although it's it's varied in different places.

The general pattern is that the Russians seem to be struggling.

They're losing a lot of forces and the Ukrainians are trying to push them back where they can.

Okay, joe with the latest in love it.

Thank you very much indeed.