The time will come when Ukraine will freely talk about the reasons why the Russian Federation agreed to the operation to evacuate people from Azovstal, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has said.

"The evacuation of civilians and soldiers from Azovstal in Mariupol is a miracle. I can say openly that we thank the UN Secretary General [António Guterres] and the Red Cross for facilitating this process. It also took many phone calls and many hours of difficult considerations and decision-makings for President Zelensky. But in the end it all worked. Time will come when we will be free to speak about the reasons why Russia agreed to this operation. For the time being I will stay silent, because I can only talk when I see all of them coming back to government-controlled territory. Now everything is very fragile and we want to save their lives, we want to protect them," Kuleba said at a press conference at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday.

He said that Ukraine is facing a much bigger problem of forcible deportation of Ukrainian citizens into the territory of Russia.

"I do not know the number, how many Ukrainians were forcibly deported, because Russia does not share this to anyone. We do not know where these people are," Kuleba added.

The minister said that he fears that the total number of forcibly deported to the Russian Federation will amount to hundreds of thousands of people.