Second attempt to evacuate Ukrainian city halted due to Russian attack, Ukraine says
A second attempt to evacuate civilians from a southern Ukrainian port city where supplies are running short was stopped due to a Russian assault, a Ukrainian official said.
The planned evacuations in Mariupol through humanitarian corridors were halted because of an ongoing assault, interior ministry adviser Anton Gerashchenko said.
"There can be no ‘green corridors’ because only the sick brain of the Russians decides when to start shooting and at whom," Gerashchenko wrote on Telegram.
Russian and Ukrainian forces had agreed to a cease-fire to allow civilians to be evacuated from the port city where food and medicine are in short supply. There have been increasing calls for humanitarian corridors to allow civilians to escape as the death toll rises.
The UN human rights office said on Sunday that 364 Ukrainian civilians have died since the beginning of the Russian invasion and a further 759 people have been injured.
Around 1.5 million Ukrainians have fled the country in the same amount of time, as a refugee crisis develops on the EU's border.
Pavlo Kirilenko, governor of the Donetsk Oblast region said on Facebook that people in Vuglehdar and Berdyansk would be left without gas "as the occupiers have damaged the Donetsk Mariupol main line."
He also said that Russian shelling on a residential building in Kramatorsk, north of Mariupol, has resulted in "at least two casualties."
However, Russian President Vladimir Putin blamed the Ukrainian side, stating that the "pause in hostilities was again used only to build up forces and means in (Ukrainian) positions", according to the Kremlin's readout of Putin's call with French President Emmanuel Macron.
Meanwhile, officials in northeastern Ukraine said on Sunday morning that they were
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