KYIV – A civilian disaster is growing in Ukraine as attempts to evacuate residents of besieged port city Mariupol failed for a second day, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy denouncing “murder” as he warned of more shelling to come today.
New shelling and attacks have sent soaring numbers of refugees fleeing, sometimes under fire, as the death toll mounts.
“It’s murder, deliberate murder,” Zelenskyy raged in an address.
“We will not forgive, we will not forget, we will punish everyone who committed atrocities in this war on our land,” he said. “There will be no quiet place on this Earth except the grave.”
He said Russia has announced new shelling today of defence targets in Ukrainian cities and denounced what he branded the “silence” of Western governments failing to speak out.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, now in its twelfth day, has seen more than 1.5 million people flee the country in what the UN has called Europe’s fastest growing refugee crisis since World War II.
Pope Francis yesterday deplored the “rivers of blood and tears” flowing in Ukraine, as Washington cited “very credible reports” that Russia had committed war crimes by deliberately attacking civilians.
Hundreds of civilians have been killed and thousands wounded, with hundreds of thousands of people – mostly women and children – pouring into neighbouring countries such as Poland, Romania, or Moldova for refuge.
Efforts to get people out of Mariupol – the scene of some of the war’s greatest ferocity – collapsed for a second day running yesterday with both sides accusing each other of breaching a ceasefire agreement.
Very few refugees from the strategic city on the Azov Sea made it out on Saturday, but one family, who did not give their names, arrived in the central city of Dnipro and recounted their harrowing experience.
“We stayed in the basement for seven days with no heating, electricity or internet and ran out of food and water,” one of them said.
“On the road, we saw there were bodies everywhere, Russians and Ukrainians...we saw that people had been buried in their basements.”
Meanwhile, the mayor of Irpin, a small town outside the capital Kyiv, described seeing two adults and two children killed “in front of my eyes” when a shell hit them.
“It is impudence, they are monsters. Irpin is at war, Irpin has not surrendered,” Oleksandr Markushyn said on Telegram, adding that part of the city was in Russian hands. – AFP, March 7, 2022
