LVIV: Fresh efforts were underway Wednesday to rescue civilians from increasingly dire situations in besieged and bombed Ukrainian cities. Days of shelling have largely cut off residents of the southern city of Mariupol from the outside world and forced them to scour for food and water.
Meanwhile, the decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear site was taken off the power grid on Wednesday and forced to switch on generators. This raised the alarm about the plant’s ability to safely cool its nuclear fuel, although the UN nuclear watchdog said it saw “no significant impact on safety” from the power cuts.
Authorities declared another ceasefire to allow civilians to flee Mariupol, Sumy in the northeast, Enerhodar in the south, Volnovakha in the southeast, Izum in the east and several cities in the region around the capital Kyiv.
Previous attempts to establish safe evacuation corridors have largely failed due to Russian military attacks, and Wednesday’s new attempt had few details on it. It was not clear if anyone was able to leave Mariupol, but some people began to fly out of Kyiv’s suburbs, even as air raid sirens repeatedly sounded in the capital and explosions were heard there. could have gone.
Mariupol, about half of its population of 430,000 expected to flee, has been surrounded by Russian forces for several days. There are corpses lying on the streets, and people break into shops in search of food and melt ice for water. Thousands crowd into basements, sheltered from Russian shells pounding this strategic port on the Sea of Azov.
“Why don’t I cry?” Resident Goma Jana demanded that she was crying by the light of an oil lamp under the ground surrounded by women and children. “I want my house, I want my job. I’m so sad about the people and the city, the kids.”
Thousands of people, both civilians and soldiers, are believed to have been killed in the two-week fighting since the invasion by President Vladimir Putin’s forces. The United Nations estimates that more than 2 million people have fled the country, which is the largest migration of refugees to Europe since the end of World War II.
The crisis is likely to get worse as Russian forces increase bombardment of cities across the country in response to stronger-than-expected resistance from Ukrainian forces. CIA director William Burns said on Tuesday that Russian losses were “much higher” than what Putin and his generals expected.
Burns told a congressional committee that “an intense push by Russian forces could mean an “ugly next few weeks”, warning that Putin is likely to “crush the Ukrainian military regardless of civilian casualties”.
Britain’s Defense Ministry said on Wednesday that fighting was continuing in the northwest of Kyiv. The cities of Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Sumy and Mariupol are under heavy fire and are surrounded by Russian forces.
Adding to the dire humanitarian conditions regarding the safety of the Chernobyl plant, the site of the world’s deadliest nuclear accident in 1986. The Russian military seized the plant last week, and on Wednesday all of its facilities were without electricity, Ukrainian grid operator Ukrainho said, citing the national nuclear regulator.
The diesel generator holds fuel for up to 48 hours. Without power, “parameters of nuclear and radiation safety” cannot be controlled, Ukrainho said.
But the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency later said that while the development violates a “critical safety pillar to ensure uninterrupted power supply”, it “sees no significant impact on safety.”
A reactor in Chernobyl exploded and caught fire in 1986. The plant was closed in 2000, but the uninhabited site still stores spent nuclear fuel from Chernobyl and other nuclear plants around Ukraine. Experts have warned of disastrous consequences if the war disrupts the power of the pumps that keep the radioactive fuel cool.
It was at least the third time that a Russian invasion raised fears of a nuclear disaster.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s General Staff said the Russian military was placing military equipment in farms and residential buildings between residential buildings in the northern city of Chernihiv. To the south, civilians dressed in Russian are advancing into the city of Mykolaiv, a Black Sea shipbuilding hub of half a million people, it said.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces are building up defenses in cities to the north, south and east, and forces around Kyiv are “holding the line” against the Russian offensive.
This resistance has been harsher than many expected – and Western nations are now rushing to increase their power. Ukraine’s president has made repeated requests for warplanes to counter Russia’s vital air power, but Western nations disagreed amid concerns that it would increase the risk of an escalating war from Ukraine. could.
Poland late Tuesday offered the US 28 MiG-29 fighters for use by Ukraine. US officials said the proposal was “untenable”, but they would continue to consult with Poland and other NATO allies.
In addition to physical support for Ukraine, Western countries have sought to pressure Russia through a series of punitive sanctions. On Tuesday, President Joe Biden said the US would impose sanctions on all Russian oil imports, even if it meant rising costs for Americans.
Energy exports have maintained a steady stream of cash flows into Russia, despite otherwise severe sanctions that have cut its economy largely off from the world. McDonald’s, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo. And General Electric all announced that they were temporarily suspending business in the country, furthering that isolation.
The move has so far done little to blunt the conflict.
A series of airstrike alerts on Wednesday morning urged residents of the capital to move to bomb shelters amid fears of incoming missiles. Associated Press reporters later heard the blasts.
Such warnings are common, though irregular, that keep people alert. Kyiv has been relatively calm in recent days, although Russian artillery has surrounded the city’s outskirts.
In those outskirts, police officers and soldiers helped elderly residents from their homes on Tuesday. People crowd together under a destroyed bridge before crossing the river on slippery wooden planks as they try to escape from Irpin, a city of 60,000 that has been targeted by Russian shelling.
The head of the Kyiv regional administration, Oleksiy Kuleba, said that while the crisis for citizens in the capital is increasing, the situation in the city’s suburbs is especially dire.
“Russia is artificially creating a humanitarian crisis in the Kyiv region, frustrating people to evacuate and continuing shelling and bombing small communities,” he said.
In the midst of the bombings, the authorities have made repeated attempts to evacuate civilians, but several attempts have been thwarted by Russian shelling.
An evacuation appeared successful on Tuesday, with Ukrainian officials saying 5,000 citizens, including 1,700 foreign students, managed to escape from Sumi, a northeastern city of a quarter-million people.
The head of the regional administration, Dmitro Zyvitsky, said that corridor was to reopen for 12 hours on Wednesday, with buses that took people to the city of Poltava to the southwest, a day before returning to pick up more refugees. First.
Preference was being given to pregnant women, women with children, the elderly and the disabled.
To the south, Russian troops have advanced deeper along Ukraine’s coastline in an effort to establish a land bridge to Crimea, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014.
It has surrounded Mariupol with Russian forces.
On Tuesday, efforts to evacuate civilians and deliver badly needed food, water and medicine failed, Ukrainian officials said as Russian forces fired on the convoy before reaching the city.
Natalia Mudrenko, a senior member of Ukraine’s UN mission, told the Security Council that the people of Mariupol were “effectively taken hostage” by the siege. Her voice was trembling with emotion as she described how a 6-year-old died shortly after her mother was killed by Russian shelling. “She was alone in the last moments of her life,” she said.
Theft has become widespread in the city as distressed residents look for food, clothing, even furniture. Some residents are reduced to drawing water from streams. Officials say they plan to begin digging mass graves for the dead.
With the power off, many people rely on their car radios for information, picking up news from stations broadcast from areas controlled by the Russian military or Russian-backed separatists.
Lyudmila Amelkina, who was walking along an alleyway with walls covered with rubble and bullets, said the destruction was devastating.
“We have no electricity, we have nothing to eat, we have no medicine. We have nothing,” he said, looking up at the sky.