A glimmer of hope for civilians stranded in Mariupol. In a press release published on Wednesday evening March 30, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that it had decided to set up a “silent regime” from Thursday at 10 a.m. (9 a.m. French time) to evacuate civilians via a humanitarian corridor to Zaporizhia, some 250 km to the northwest. In Mariupol, some 160,000 civilians are still stranded by bombs and facing a humanitarian catastrophe, living in shelters without electricity and lacking food and water, according to testimonies. Follow our live.
Negotiations stalled. Seeming to go back on announcements made by Moscow after discussions between the belligerents on Tuesday in Istanbul, the spokesman for the Russian presidency Dmitry Peskov said he could not “to report anything very promising or some kind of breakthrough”. “At the moment we cannot talk about progress and we are not going to do so”he insisted.
Ukrainian mistrust. “We don’t believe anyone, not a single beautiful phrase”Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in the evening, adding that Russian forces were regrouping to attack the Donbass region. “We will not give in. We will fight for every meter of our territory”he said.
More than four million refugees. In five weeks of war, more than four million Ukrainians have been forced to flee their country, announced the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (HCR) in Geneva. Europe had not seen such waves of refugees since the Second World War. In total, more than ten million people, more than a quarter of the population, had to leave their homes.