Ukrainian officials said a bread factory had been hit by a Russian air strike yesterday as the country’s negotiators assembled for talks with Russian officials after previous rounds that brought no respite in the conflict.
The bodies of at least 13 civilians were recovered from rubble after factory in the town of Makariv in the Kyiv region was hit, local emergency services said. Five people were rescued of the 30 believed to have been there at the time. Reuters was not immediately able to verify the reported attack.
Russia earlier offered Ukrainians escape routes to Russia and its close ally Belarus yesterday after weekend evacuation ceasefire attempts failed. In the besieged southern port city of Mariupol hundreds of thousands of people remained trapped without food and water under regular bombardments.
A Ukrainian negotiator urged Russia to stop its assault on Ukraine, which the United Nations said had sent 1.7mn people fleeing to Central Europe.
“In a few minutes, we will start talking to representatives of a country that seriously believes large-scale violence against civilians is an argument,” Ukrainian negotiator Mykhailo Podolyak said on Twitter. “Prove that this is not the case.”
Under the Russian offer, a corridor from the capital Kyiv would lead to Russia’s ally Belarus, while civilians from Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second biggest city, would be directed to Russia, according to maps published by the RIA news agency.
“Attempts by the Ukrainian side to deceive Russia and the whole civilised world...are useless this time,” the Russian defence ministry said after announcing the “humanitarian corridors”.
A spokesperson for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the Russian proposal was “completely immoral”.
“They are citizens of Ukraine, they should have the right to evacuate to the territory of Ukraine,” the spokesperson said.
A day earlier, Reuters journalists had witnessed people trying to flee the town of Irpin near Kyiv getting caught in Russian shelling.
Yesterday people picked their way over the twisted ruins of a large bridge in Irpin, with river water rushing just beneath them.
“It’s like a disaster. The city is almost ruined and the district where I’m living (there are) no houses which were not bombed,” a young woman leaving with her children told Reuters.
The general staff of Ukraine’s armed forces said Russian forces were “beginning to accumulate resources for the storming of Kyiv”, a city of more than 3mn, after days of slow progress in their main advance south from Belarus.
Ukraine said 2,000 civilians had been evacuated from Irpin, where Reuters journalists on Sunday saw people running for their lives and diving for cover as explosions burst and flames shot up into the sky. Panting with exhaustion and shock, they were helped onto buses by Ukrainian troops.
In Mariupol, deputy mayor Sergei Orlov said there had also been continuous air raids overnight. Ukraine said yesterday its forces had retaken control of the town of Chuhuiv in the northeast, site of heavy fighting for days, and of the strategic Mykolayiv airport in the south, which the regional governor said was under tank fire. Neither claim could immediately be verified.
The United Nations called for safe passage to reach people cut off from lifesaving aid across Ukraine. In a humanitarian update it described one psychiatric hospital 60km from Kyiv running out of water and medicine with 670 people trapped inside, including bedridden patients with severe needs.
A woman reacts as an evacuation train with children from Kyiv’s Central Children’s Hospital departs to Lviv at Kyiv central train station yesterday. (Reuters)
