LVIV, Ukraine (AP) — The evacuation of people fleeing fighting in Ukrainian cities along safe corridors began on Tuesday as UN officials said the exodus of refugees due to the Russian invasion had reached 2 million.
The Russian attack has trapped people in cities running out of food, water and medicine in the biggest ground war in Europe since World War II.
Previous attempts to lure civilians to safety have failed due to new attacks. But on Tuesday, video released by Ukrainian officials showed busloads of people moving down a snow-covered road from the eastern city of Sumy and yellow buses with a red cross heading towards the southern port of Mariupol.
It was not clear how long the effort would last.
“The Ukrainian city of Sumy has received a green corridor, the first stage of evacuation has begun,” the Ukrainian state communications agency said in a statement.
While some people fled to other cities in Ukraine, many chose to leave the country instead. Safa Msely, spokesperson for the UN International Organization for Migration, tweeted that 2 million people have now left, including at least 100,000 who are not Ukrainians.
As the invasion continues into its second week, Russian forces have made significant gains in southern Ukraine but stalled in some other regions. Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers have fortified the capital Kyiv with hundreds of roadblocks and barricades designed to thwart the takeover. A continuous rain of shells and rockets hit other communities, including the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, where the mayor reported heavy artillery fire.
“We can’t even collect the bodies, because shelling from heavy weapons does not stop day or night,” said the mayor Anatoly Fedoruk. “Dogs disassemble the bodies on the streets of the city. A nightmare”.
In one of the most desperate cities, Mariupol, some 200,000 people—nearly half of the population of 430,000—hoped to flee.
Russia’s Coordinating Center for Humanitarian Efforts in Ukraine and Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk said a ceasefire should begin Tuesday morning to allow some citizens to evacuate, but it’s unclear where all the corridors lead, amid disagreements between the two sides .
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The Russian focal point has suggested that there will be several corridors, but most of them will lead to Russia either directly or through Belarus. However, at the UN, the Russian ambassador proposed opening corridors from several cities, and people could choose for themselves which direction they should move.
Meanwhile, Vereshchuk only said that both sides had agreed to evacuate civilians from the eastern city of Sumy towards the Ukrainian city of Poltava. The evacuees include foreign students from India and China, she said.
She reiterated that Russian proposals to evacuate civilians to Russia and its ally Belarus, which was the launching pad for the invasion, were unacceptable.
Later, Ukrainian presidential aide Kyrylo Timoshenko posted a video of yellow buses with a red cross on the side, which he said were used to evacuate Mariupol.
Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said that 30 buses with humanitarian aid, including water, basic food and medicine, were sent from Zaporozhye to Mariupol, which will be used to evacuate civilians.
Demand for effective passages has grown amid increased shelling by Russian troops. Incessant shelling, including in some of the most populated regions of Ukraine, has led to a humanitarian crisis associated with a decrease in food, water and medicine supplies.
Despite all this, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukrainian forces were showing unprecedented courage.
“The problem is that for one Ukrainian soldier we have 10 Russian soldiers, and for one Ukrainian tank we have 50 Russian tanks,” Zelensky said in an interview with ABC News that aired Monday night. But he noted that the gap in power was shrinking and that even if the Russian troops “entered all our cities”, they would be met with mutinies.
A senior U.S. official said several countries are debating whether to provide them with the military jets Zelensky has asked for.
The besieged city of Mariupol lacked water, food and electricity, and cellular communications did not work. Shops have been looted as residents search for essential goods. The police moved through the city, advising people to stay in shelters until they heard official announcements over loudspeakers about the evacuation.
There is an acute shortage of antibiotics and painkillers in the hospitals of Mariupol, doctors performed some emergency procedures without them.
Due to the lack of telephone service, worried citizens approached strangers to ask if they knew relatives living in other parts of the city and if they were safe.
The battle for Mariupol is critical because its capture could allow Moscow to establish a land corridor to Crimea, which Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014.
Several hundred kilometers (miles) west of Mariupol, Russian forces continued their offensive in Mykolaiv, opening fire on the Black Sea shipbuilding center with a population of half a million, according to the Ukrainian military. Rescuers said that they were extinguishing fires that arose as a result of rocket attacks on residential areas.
On Tuesday, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said that Ukrainian forces continue defensive operations in the suburbs of the city.
The General Staff said that “demoralized” Russian troops were looting the places they occupied, seizing civilian buildings such as farms, hangars for military equipment, and setting up firing positions in populated areas. These claims cannot be independently verified.
The Ukrainian Defense Forces also participated in operations in the northern city of Chernihiv and on the outskirts of Kyiv, the General Staff said.
In Kyiv, soldiers and volunteers built hundreds of roadblocks to defend a city of nearly 4 million people, often using sandbags, stacked tires and spiked cables. Some of the barricades looked substantial, with heavy concrete slabs and sandbags stacked more than two stories high, while others looked more haphazard, with hundreds of books used to weight stacks of tires.
“For every house, every street, every roadblock, we will fight to the death, if necessary,” Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.
In Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine with a population of 1.4 million, apartment buildings were shelled.
“I think he broke through the fourth floor below us,” Dmitry Sedorenko said from a hospital bed in Kharkiv. “Immediately everything started to burn and fall apart.” As the floor beneath him collapsed, he crawled out through the third floor, past the bodies of some of the neighbors.
In the small town of Gorenka, where shelling reduced one district to ashes and shards of glass, rescuers and residents rummaged through the ruins as chickens pecked around.
“What are they doing?” – asked the attackers rescuer Vasily Oksak. “Two small children and two elderly people lived here. Come in and see what they’ve done.”
In The Hague, Ukraine appealed to the International Court of Justice to stop the Russian invasion, saying that Moscow was committing large-scale war crimes.
Russia “is resorting to tactics reminiscent of medieval siege wars, where they encircle cities, cut off escape routes and bombard civilians with heavy artillery shells,” said Jonathan Gimblet, a member of Ukraine’s legal team.
The fighting has sent energy prices skyrocketing around the world and plummeting inventories, as well as endangering the food supply and livelihoods of people around the world who depend on crops grown in the fertile Black Sea region.
The UN Human Rights Office reported 406 confirmed civilian deaths, but said the real number was much higher.
On Monday, Moscow again announced a series of demands to stop the invasion, including that Ukraine recognize Crimea as part of Russia and recognize the eastern regions controlled by Moscow-backed separatists as independent. He also pushed for Ukraine to change its constitution to ensure that it does not join international organizations such as NATO and the EU. Ukraine has already rejected these demands.
Zelenskiy has called for stronger punitive measures against Russia, including a global boycott of its oil exports, which are key to its economy.
“If (Russia) does not want to abide by civilized rules, then it should not receive goods and services from civilization,” he said in a video message.
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This story has been updated to correct that there were no people on the buses in the video from Mariupol, although the official said they were part of an evacuation effort.
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Associated Press reporters from around the world contributed to this report.
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Follow AP reporting on the Ukraine crisis at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine.