On Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused the Russian army of preventing the evacuation of civilians from the besieged cities of Mariupol and Volnovaka (southeast), and carrying out an attack on the planned route of a humanitarian corridor.
• Read also: direct | Fifteenth day of fighting
Russian forces did not stop firing. Despite everything, I decided to send a convoy of vehicles to Mariupol, with food, water and medicine (…) but the passengers launched a tank attack where exactly this lane was supposed to pass,” he said, in the title of a video posted by the Presidency.
It is supposed terrorism, shameless terrorism, from experienced terrorists. The whole world should know that.
The Ukrainian leader said about 100,000 people have been able to leave in the past two days from other fighting-battered Ukrainian cities, including 40,000 on Thursday alone, via humanitarian corridors.
The Russian army is laying siege to a number of major Ukrainian cities and continues to bombard them, such as the one that hit a children’s hospital and a maternity hospital on Wednesday in Mariupol, a strategic port on the Sea of Azov that has been besieged for ten days.
On Thursday, Moscow promised to open daily humanitarian corridors to allow Ukrainians fleeing the fighting to reach Russia.
But Ukraine, for its part, demands safe passages within its borders and not towards the country that is bombing its population.
