A truce will have to be respected from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. around six areas hit by the fighting. The number of refugees who have fled Ukraine is now estimated between “2.1 and 2.2 million people”.
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| Evacuation of civilians after the bombing of a bridge in Irpin, March 8, 2022. (SERGEI SUPINSKY / AFP) |
Russians and Ukrainians agreed this Wednesday, March 9 to respect ceasefires supposed to allow the evacuation of civilians from several bombarded regions, on the 14th day of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, that Western sanctions and the boycott of many companies have pushed them to the brink of default.
On Wednesday morning, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk confirmed that an agreement had been reached with the Russians on the establishment between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. local time (7 a.m. and 7 p.m. GMT) of six humanitarian corridors around areas hard hit by the fighting in recent days, forcing civilians to sometimes stay hidden in cellars for days.
In particular, corridors have been defined to evacuate civilians from Energodar to Zaporozhe (south), from Izium to Lozova (east) and from Sumy to Poltava (north-east). Several corridors are also planned to evacuate civilians to Kiev from several towns west of the capital, including Boutcha, Irpin and Gostomel.
Still more refugees
On Tuesday in Sumy, a city 350 km northeast of Kiev, around 60 buses, in two convoys, managed to bring civilians to safety – mostly women, children and the elderly, according to the deputy chief. of the Ukrainian presidential administration, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, quoted by Ukrainian media. More than 5,000 people were thus able to be evacuated from this town of some 250,000 inhabitants, located near the Russian border and the scene of heavy fighting for several days.
The number of refugees who have fled Ukraine since the invasion by the Russian army on February 24 is increasing day by day. It is now estimated between “2.1 and 2.2 million people ,” High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said on Wednesday at a press conference in Stockholm. “Poland receives 150,000 a day alone. It's going very fast, we don't see this movement stopping ,” he said.
Tuesday evening, several cities were again the targets of Russian attacks. In Severodonetsk, in the east of the country, 10 people died in bombardments, according to the head of the administrative region of Lugansk. And in the Zhytomyr region, west of Kiev, nine people died in airstrikes. In Kiev, the sirens sounded four times in the night.