French forces could be dispatched to Ukraine as Emmanuel Macron plans an evacuation mission to save up to 100,000 Ukrainians from the besieged port city of Mariupol.
The French president is expected to talk to Vladimir Putin to convince the Kremlin to allow the evacuation to take place.
The news came as Vadym Boychenko, the mayor of Mariupol, said on Saturday that Russian troops had abducted at least 15,000 people and forcibly moved them to Kremlin-controlled territory.
Satellite images appeared to show the formation of a camp in the coastal village of Bezimenne, in the separatist-controlled Donetsk region, just 11 miles from Mariupol.
“The occupiers are forcing people already exhausted by the war to get on buses,” Mr Boychenko said, in a statement posted on the Telegram messaging app.
He added: “There is also information that the Russian occupiers are confiscating people’s passports and other Ukrainian identity documents. The deported people are first taken to so-called filtration camps, from where they are redistributed to various remote cities in Russia.”
