With the evacuation by bus of the first civilians from Sumy, a city of 250,000 inhabitants in eastern Ukraine, we have the impression of reliving the Syrian scenario. According to the governor of Sumy, the convoy organized on the morning of Tuesday March 8 was destined for the city of Poltava, further west. The disabled, pregnant women and orphans were given priority for transfer. Vehicles with residents of the city on board also used this humanitarian corridor.
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In the suburb of Kiev, in Irpin, civilians were able to leave the city, ravaged by the last extremely violent bombardments. But in the south of the country, in Mariupol, a port besieged by the Russian army on the Sea of Azov, the Ukrainian authorities accused Moscow of not respecting the humanitarian corridor, which is supposed to evacuate part of the 300,000 civilians trapped in the city.
We remember the dramatic images of the evacuations of Homs, Aleppo, Ghouta, the rebel suburb of Damascus. Implacable, the scenario was always the same. Cities were surrounded on the ground by Bashar Al-Assad’s army, while in the air Russian fighter jets bombarded civilian and military targets. Traumatized by the crash of the explosions, hungry and exhausted, the rebel strongholds eventually surrendered and hoisted the white flag. Humanitarian convoys were then organized by Russia to evacuate first the civilians, then the anti-Assad fighters. All ended up in the pocket of Idlib, a dead end of an aborted revolution.
Today, in the urban war that Russia is waging in Ukraine, the prospect of encirclement and then of assault on the big cities takes shape day after day. On the other hand, the Ukrainians are organizing resistance in the neighborhoods and want to fight to the end. In the logic of the Kremlin, when we speak of “humanitarian corridor”, it is certainly a question of evacuating civilians but to better fulfill military objectives. Because what the Russian army seeks is not only to obtain a capitulation from Ukraine and its leaders, but also to reconfigure the demographic balance on the ground, as it did in Syria.