Lviv: Buses packed with people fleeing the Russian invasion in Ukraine left two embattled cities along safe corridors Tuesday, while officials said the exodus of refugees from the country reached 2 million.
The Russian onslaught has trapped people inside besieged cities that are running low on food, water and medicine amid the biggest ground war in Europe since World War II.
Previous attempts to lead civilians to safety have crumbled with renewed attacks. But on Tuesday, video posted by Ukrainian officials showed buses packed with people moving along a snowy road from the eastern city of Sumy and others leaving the besieged southern port of Mariupol.
It was not clear how long the effort would last.
“The Ukrainian city of Sumy was given a green corridor, the first stage of evacuation began,” the Ukrainian state communications agency tweeted.
Those buses are headed to other cities in Ukraine, but many people have chosen to flee the country instead.
Safa Msehli, a spokesperson for the UN’s International Organisation for Migration, tweeted that 2 million have now fled the country, including at least 100,000 people who are not Ukrainian.
With the invasion well into its second week, Russian troops have made significant advances in southern Ukraine but stalled in some other regions. Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers fortified the capital, Kyiv, with hundreds of checkpoints and barricades designed to thwart a takeover.
A steady rain of shells and rockets fell on other population centres, including the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, where the mayor reported heavy artillery fire.
“We can’t even gather up the bodies because the shelling from heavy weapons doesn’t stop day or night,” Mayor Anatol Fedoruk said. “Dogs are pulling apart the bodies on the city streets. It’s a nightmare.” In one of the most desperate cities, Mariupol, an estimated 200,000 people — nearly half the population of 430,000 — hoped to flee.
Russia’s coordination centre for humanitarian efforts in Ukraine and Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk both said a cease-fire was agreed to start Tuesday morning to allow some civilians to evacuate, but it was not clear where all the corridors would lead to, amid disagreement between the two sides.
Russia’s coordination centre suggested there would be more than one corridor, but that most would lead to Russia, either directly or through Belarus.
At the UN, however, the Russian ambassador suggested corridors from several cities could be opened and people could choose for themselves which direction they would take.
Vereshchuk, meanwhile, only said that the two sides had agreed to an evacuation of civilians from the eastern city of Sumy, toward the Ukrainian city of Poltava. Those to be evacuated include foreign students from India and China, she said.