LVIV, Ukraine — Renewed efforts to rescue civilians from increasingly dire conditions in besieged and bombarded Ukrainian cities were underway on Wednesday. Days of shelling have largely cut residents of the southern city of Mariupol off from the outside world and forced them to scavenge for food and water, AP reported.
Meanwhile, the decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear site was knocked off the power grid on Wednesday and forced to switch onto generators, a worrying new development that raised alarm about the plant’s ability to keep its nuclear fuel safely cool.
Authorities announced another cease-fire to allow civilians to escape from Mariupol, Sumy in the northeast, Enerhodar in the south, Volnovakha in the southeast, Izyum in the east, and several towns in the region around the capital, Kyiv.
Previous attempts to establish safe evacuation corridors have largely failed due to attacks by Russian forces, and there were few details on Wednesday’s new effort. It was not clear if anyone was able to leave Mariupol, but some people did start streaming out of Kyiv’s suburbs, even as air raid sirens repeatedly went off in the capital and explosions could be heard there.
Mariupol, which nearly half of the population of 430,000 is hoping to flee, has been surrounded by Russian forces for days. Corpses lie in the streets, and people break into stores in search of food and melt snow for water. Thousands huddle in basements, sheltering from the Russian shells pounding this strategic port on the Azov Sea.“Why shouldn’t I cry?” resident Goma Janna demanded as she wept by the light of an oil lamp below ground, surrounded by women and children. “I want my home, I want my job. I’m so sad about people and about the city, the children.”
Thousands of people are thought to have been killed, both civilians and soldiers, in two weeks of fighting since President Vladimir Putin’s forces battled. The UN estimates that more than 2 million people have fled the country, the biggest exodus of refugees in Europe since the end of World War II.
The crisis is likely to get worse as Russian forces step up their bombardment of cities throughout the country in response to stronger than expected resistance from Ukrainian forces. Russian losses have been “far in excess” of what Putin and his generals expected, CIA Director William Burns said Tuesday.
An intensified push by Russian forces could mean “an ugly next few weeks,” Burns told a congressional committee, warning that Putin was likely to “grind down the Ukrainian military with no regard for civilian casualties.”
Britain’s Defense Ministry said on Wednesday that fighting continues northwest of Kyiv. The cities of Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Sumy and Mariupol are being heavily shelled and remain encircled by Russian forces.
Adding to the dire humanitarian conditions were concerns about the safety of the Chernobyl plant, site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster in 1986. Russian forces seized plant last week, and on Wednesday all its facilities were without power, the Ukrainian grid operator Ukrenerho said, citing the national nuclear regulator.
The diesel generators have fuel for 48 hours. Without power, the “parameters of nuclear and radiation safety” cannot be controlled, Ukrenerho said.
The Ukrainian state communications agency said the outage could put systems for cooling nuclear material at risk. While the Chernobyl is no longer in use, it still stores spent nuclear fuel, which must be kept cool.
It was at least the third time that the Russian offensive raised the specter of a nuclear disaster.
Meanwhile, Russian forces are placing military equipment on farms and amid residential buildings in the northern city of Chernihiv, Ukraine’s general staff said. In the south, Russians dressed in civilian clothes are advancing on the city of Mykolaiv, a Black Sea shipbuilding center of a half-million people, it said.
The Ukrainian military, meanwhile, is building up defenses in cities in the north, south and east, and forces around Kyiv are “holding the line” against the Russian offensive.
That resistance is stiffer than many expected — and Western nations are rushing now to bolster their force. Ukraine’s president has pleaded repeatedly for warplanes to counter Russia’s significant air power, but Western countries have disagreed over how best to do that amid concerns it could raise the risk of the war expanding beyond Ukraine.
Poland late Tuesday offered to give the US 28 MiG-29 fighter planes for Ukraine’s use. US officials said that proposal was “untenable,” but they would continue to consult with Poland and other NATO allies.
