(Kyiv) Thousands of civilians were able to flee the city of Sumy in northeastern Ukraine, where Russian forces promised a new truce on Wednesday, nearly two weeks after their invasion of the country, which has already caused hundreds of deaths and millions of refugees.
Updated yesterday at 11:51 p.m.
More than 5,000 people have been evacuated so far from the city of Sumy, located 350 km northeast of Kyiv, Deputy Head of the Ukrainian Presidential Administration, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, was quoted by Ukrainian media as saying on Wednesday. .
About sixty buses, in two convoys, managed to secure these civilians, women, children and the elderly for the most part, he had already indicated on Tuesday without giving figures.
The Ukrainian authorities had announced the establishment of a humanitarian corridor on Tuesday morning to evacuate civilians from Sumy, a city of more than 250,000 inhabitants located near the Russian border and the scene of heavy fighting for several days.
“But this is only one percent of what we have to do, of what is expected by my people, by the Ukrainians who are stuck” in the combat zones, judged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in a message Tuesday night video.
On Wednesday, a new truce must come into effect to allow the evacuation of other civilians, assured the Russian army.
This did not prevent it, according to the Ukrainian emergency services, from bombing the small town of Malyn on Tuesday evening, in the Zhytomyr region, west of Kyiv, where five people including two babies died. after the destruction of seven houses.
Evacuations also continued in the Kyiv region, despite fire on humanitarian corridors, according to the head of the local administration Oleksiï Kouleba.
Kyiv and its three million inhabitants are cut off from the rest of the country on three flanks: fighting rages in its northern and western suburbs, and the roads to the east are blocked by Russian tanks and fields of mine.
In Irpin, AFP saw hundreds of people waiting to cross the river of the same name on foot, on makeshift footbridges made of planks, wooden pallets and metal carcasses, in the direction of Kyiv, by the only axis not yet occupied by the Russian army. About 2,000 residents were able to escape from this locality, according to the Ukrainian police.
Like many, Oleksei Ivanovitch, 86, did not want to leave his house, even when Russian tanks, coming from the north, bombarded and took the neighboring town of Boutcha, then seized part of Irpin. “It was my son and my grandson who told me to leave,” he said, on the arm of his wife Oleksandra, 81.
At the northern gates of the capital, the population is desperately trying to leave Boutcha. “The most important thing is to get the kids out. There are a lot of children and women,” resident Anna told AFP.
In the southeast, at Mariupol, a major strategic port on the Sea of Azov, some 300,000 civilians were also stuck, the Ukrainian government said.
In the south, in Mykolaiv, near Odessa, lines of cars filled with civilians fleeing the fighting stretched for miles, while shots echoed from the front line, noted an AFP journalist.
The conflict that started on February 24 has also prompted more than two million people to leave Ukrainian territory to seek refuge abroad, mainly in Poland, according to the UN. Europe expects to receive five million exiles.
Suspension of Russian gas imports
The United States also decided on Tuesday to suspend imports of Russian oil and gas, thus taking the lead in the Western camp in the sanctions imposed on Moscow since the attack on Ukraine.
The United Kingdom, for its part, will cease by the end of the year its purchases of crude oil and Russian petroleum products.
US President Joe Biden assured that his decision would “deal a powerful blow to Putin” and to the financing of his war against Ukraine. Mr. Zelensky warmly thanked his American counterpart on Tuesday evening for this “signal of maximum power addressed to the whole world”.
He called on the European Union to follow this example by adopting “tough measures, sanctions against Russia for its war”, but without directly calling for a European embargo on oil or gas.
The Europeans, 30% dependent on Russian crude, have so far refused to go that far.
Some companies are also seeking to take their share, after being put under pressure by public opinion. The American chains McDonald’s and Starbucks will temporarily close their many establishments in Russia, following in the footsteps of the global cosmetics giant L’Oréal. Coca-Cola has announced the suspension of its operations in the country.
However, Western military aid is proving more difficult to implement. The United States thus considered that Warsaw’s proposal to deliver its MIG-29 planes to the American army and then hand them over to Ukraine was not “viable”.
Poland said on Tuesday that it was ready to “move all its MIG-29 planes to the Ramstein base (in Germany, editor’s note) without delay and free of charge and make them available to the United States government”.
Almost two weeks of fighting
After almost two weeks of offensive, the Russian forces continued to deploy around the metropolises or intensified their bombardments, ensured Ukrainian officials.
The Pentagon has reported a new Russian column advancing towards Kyiv from the northeast, while the main one, coming from the north, has been at a standstill for several days.
According to the Pentagon, “2000 to 4000” Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine since the start of the offensive.
On March 2, Russia had reported 497 dead in its ranks, but it gave no new assessment of its losses.
“We will fight until the end,” the Ukrainian president launched on Tuesday by video link from Kyiv, in front of the British parliament.
In an interview with the American television channel ABC, Mr. Zelensky also declared that he no longer insisted on Ukraine’s membership of NATO, one of the issues invoked by Moscow to justify the invasion.
Mr. Zelensky also said he was ready for a “compromise” on the status of the separatist territories in eastern Ukraine, whose independence Vladimir Putin unilaterally recognized.
The United States also fears that Russian forces could “take control” of “biological research” structures in Ukraine and seize sensitive materials, at a time when new fears are emerging about the Chernobyl nuclear center.
“Ukraine has biological research facilities, and we are actually now quite worried about the possibility of Russian forces trying to take control of them,” said the number three of the American diplomacy, Victoria Nuland, during a parliamentary hearing.
The AEIA, the UN agency for nuclear security, said for its part that it had lost contact with the systems controlling remotely the nuclear materials of the Chernobyl power plant.