Ukraine evacuated civilians from some of its hardest-hit urban areas on Tuesday but quickly paused the effort after a tentative ceasefire with Russian forces was broken by shelling.
After several failed attempts to allow civilians to escape frontline fighting in recent days, Russia and Ukraine finally halted hostilities for long enough to allow some residents to leave the embattled city of Sumy in the north-east of the country, and Irpin on the outskirts of the capital Kyiv.
But soon after the first group of packed buses left Sumy, the agreement to halt hostilities from 9am to 9pm failed as the agreed safe route came under what local Ukrainian authorities described as tank fire.
“Shooting began along the route of the green corridor, including audible tanks,” wrote Mykhailo Ananchenko, an assistant to Sumy’s mayor, in a Facebook post. He added that the departure of residents could resume if the ceasefire was properly enforced.
The limited evacuations came as Russia continued to pound Ukraine’s other frontline cities with missile and artillery fire. Iryna Vereshchuk, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, said a convoy of supplies had been shelled on its journey to the besieged port city of Mariupol, where she warned of an unfolding “humanitarian catastrophe”.
After almost two weeks of fierce fighting, Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has devastated cities, created 2mn refugees and shaken markets, fuelling concerns that a commodity crunch could hit the world economy.
Despite deteriorating conditions on the ground, Russia has repeatedly failed to enforce promises of a ceasefire, blaming Ukrainian violations. Ukrainian officials remained wary on Tuesday, fearing the latest offer may turn out to be what President Volodymyr Zelensky has called cynical “propaganda”.
Ukraine said that it had sent to Russia and the International Committee of the Red Cross proposed routes for humanitarian corridors from the besieged cities of Volnovakha and Mariupol in the south towards Zaporizhzhia, and from Kyiv and Kharkiv in the east towards western Ukraine.
Hundreds of thousands of civilians continue to flee Ukraine every day, with the UN estimating that 2mn people have sought refuge in neighbouring countries already. EU officials said they expected as many as 5mn refugees, in what is one of the biggest movements of people across Europe in half a century.
In a show of defiance, Zelensky praised Ukrainians for their “courage” and “dignity” in a night-time address shot while standing in front of the window of his office on Kyiv’s Bankova Street.
Several Ukrainian towns and cities remain under siege conditions, with Mariupol hardest hit. Encircled by Russian forces for almost a week, the city is facing shortages of water, electricity, food and medicines, according to Ukrainian and UN aid officials. About 200,000 residents are trying to flee, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Moscow again said safe routes would be available on Tuesday allowing civilians to escape cities including Kharkiv, Kyiv, Sumy and Mariupol. But unlike Monday’s proposal for so-called humanitarian corridors, which offered Ukrainians passage out to either Russia or Belarus, Russian officials said they were willing to offer other routes if agreed with Ukraine.
Ukraine’s military said on Tuesday morning that Russian troops were continuing their offensive but that the pace of their advance had slowed significantly.
This echoed an earlier assessment by the US Pentagon that Russian troops had failed to make “any noteworthy progress” in seizing territory and so were relying more on long-range missile and artillery strikes on cities they had not yet reached.
US officials said Russian troops were continuing to advance in southern Ukraine, tightening their grip around Mariupol and moving closer to the port city of Odesa. Fierce fighting also continues around the southern city of Mykolaiv as Russia attempts to take control of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast.
But Russian forces were largely stymied in the north, where they are attempting to encircle Kyiv. “As they continue to get frustrated, they continue to rely more on what we would call long-range fires . . . missile strikes, long-range artillery into city centres that they aren’t in yet,” said John Kirby, Pentagon spokesman.
Some military analysts and western officials think Russia is replenishing supplies, attempting to address logistical problems and consolidating its positions around Kyiv before launching a concerted offensive.
Ukrainian and Russian delegations ended a third round of talks on Monday evening with no signs of significant progress. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukraine’s president, said there had been some “small positive developments” in discussions on exit routes for civilians.
But Vladimir Medinsky, head of the Russian delegation to the talks, told Russian news agency Interfax they “were not easy”, “fell short of [Russia’s] expectations” and that it was “too soon to talk of something positive”.
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2022-03-08 14:44:47Z
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