Home ›› 06 Mar 2022 ›› Front
Russia and Ukraine blamed each other on Saturday for a failure to provide safe passage to civilians fleeing two cities besieged and bombarded by Russian forces, on the 10th day of a war that has fuelled Europe’s biggest humanitarian disaster in decades.
The war, which began with Russia’s invasion on February 24, has sent nearly 1.5 million refugees fleeing westward into the European Union and provoked unprecedented international sanctions on Moscow and warnings of a global recession.
The Russian defence ministry said its units had opened humanitarian corridors near the cities of Mariupol and Volnovakha, which have been encircled by its troops.
But in Mariupol, the city council said Russia was not observing the ceasefire and it asked residents to return to shelters and await further information on evacuation.
Russia’s defence ministry accused Ukrainian “nationalists” of preventing civilians from leaving.
The southeastern port has endured heavy bombardment, a sign of its strategic value to Moscow due to its position between Russian-backed separatist-held eastern Ukraine and the Black Sea Crimean peninsula, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014.
The Ukrainian government said the plan was to evacuate around 200,000 people from Mariupol and 15,000 from Volnovakha.
Ukraine claimed on Saturday that over 10,000 Russian soldiers had been killed and 1,870 units of heavy and light military equipment, including 39 fighter planes and 40 helicopters, had been destroyed since Russia launched the invasion on February 24, reports Anadolu Agency.
