LVIV, Ukraine (News Wires) – Ukrainians boarded buses to flee the besieged eastern city of Sumy on Tuesday, the first evacuation from a Ukrainian city through a humanitarian corridor agreed with Russia.
Ukraine said a separate convoy of 30 buses was also headed to Mariupol to evacuate residents from that southern port, which has been encircled without food, water, power or heat and subjected to relentless bombardment for a week.
The United Nations said the number of refugees who have fled Ukraine had surged past 2 million, describing the flight as one of the fastest exoduses in modern times.
The evacuations from Sumy to the city of Poltava further west began hours after a Russian air strike in Sumy, which local authorities said had killed 21 people. Reuters could not verify that report.
“We have already started the evacuation of civilians from Sumy to Poltava, including foreign students,” Ukraine’s foreign ministry said in a tweet. “We call on Russia to uphold its ceasefire commitment, to refrain from activities that endanger the lives of people and to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid.”
Dmytro Zhyvytsky, the governor of the Sumy region, said in a video statement that a second column of civilians would leave Sumy at around 11:00 GMT. A short video clip released by presidential advisor Kyrylo Tymoshenko showed a red bus with some civilians on board.
Residents were also leaving the town of Irpin, a frontline Kyiv suburb where Reuters journalists had filmed families fleeing for their lives under fierce bombardment on Sunday.
Residents ran with their young children in strollers or cradling babies in arms, while others carried pets and plastic bags of belongings.
“The city is almost ruined, and the district where I’m living, it’s like there are no houses which were not bombed,” said one young mother, holding a baby beneath a blanket, while her daughter stood by her side. “Yesterday was the hardest bombing, and the lights and sound is so scary, and the whole building is shaking.”
Moscow describes its actions in Ukraine as a “special operation” to disarm its neighbour and unseat leaders it calls neo-Nazis. Ukraine and its Western allies call this a baseless pretext for a military operation to conquer a country of 44 million people.
Western sanctions have cut off Russia from international trade and financial markets to a degree never before imposed on such a big economy.
Russia is the world’s leading exporter of oil and gas, and both Russia and Ukraine are major suppliers of grain and metals, creating concern the conflict could severely disrupt supplies and derail the global recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.
On Tuesday, London trading in nickel was suspended after its prices doubled to $100,000 a tonne as a result of supply concerns.
Establishing humanitarian corridors for evacuations and aid has been the main focus of three rounds of talks between Ukrainian and Russian officials in Belarus, the last of which was held on Monday.
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