More than 1 million people have fled Ukraine following Russia’s invasion, in the swiftest refugee exodus this century, the UN said yesterday, as Moscow said it was ready for more talks to end fighting even as its forces pressed their assaults on the country’s second-largest city and two strategic seaports.
The UN refugee agency’s tally, reached on Wednesday, amounts to more than 2 percent of Ukraine’s population being forced out of the country in seven days.
The mass evacuation could be seen in Kharkiv, a city of about 1.5 million people, where residents desperate to escape falling shells and bombs crowded the city’s train station and pressed onto trains, not always knowing where they were headed.
Photo: AP
While a long military column appears stalled north of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, Russian troops seized Kherson, a Black Sea city of 290,000 people, after a three-day siege that left it short of food and medicine.
Russian troops have been advancing elsewhere on the southern front and are besieging the port city of Mariupol east of Kherson, which is without water or electricity in the depths of winter.
A second round of talks aimed at ending the fighting was expected later yesterday in Belarus — although the two sides appeared to have little common ground.
Photo: AFP
“We are ready to conduct talks, but we will continue the operation because we won’t allow Ukraine to preserve a military infrastructure that threatens Russia,” Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov said, adding that it would let Ukrainians to choose what government they should have.
The UN General Assembly on Wednesday overwhelmingly adopted a resolution that “demands” Russia “immediately” withdraw from Ukraine.
After more than two days of extraordinary debate, which saw the Ukrainian ambassador accuse Russia of genocide, 141 out of 193 UN member states voted for the nonbinding resolution.
“The world is rejecting Russia’s lies,” US President Joe Biden said in a statement later on Wednesday. “Russia is responsible for the devastating abuses of human rights and the international humanitarian crisis that we are watching unfold in Ukraine in real time.”
China was among the 35 countries which abstained, while just five — Belarus, Eritrea, North Korea, Syria and, of course, Russia — voted against it.
The resolution “deplores” the invasion of Ukraine “in the strongest terms,” and condemns Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to put his nuclear forces on alert.
The vote had been touted by diplomats as a bellwether of democracy in a world where autocracy is on the rise.
“They have come to deprive Ukraine of the very right to exist,” Ukrainian Ambassador to the UN Sergiy Kyslytsya told the assembly ahead of the vote.
“It’s already clear that the goal of Russia is not an occupation only. It is genocide,” he added.
The Russian Ministry of Defense said it had knocked out a reserve broadcasting center in Kyiv’s Lysa Hora District, adding that unspecified precision weapons were used, and that there were no casualties or damage to residential buildings.
A statement from the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces said that Russian forces were “regrouping” and “trying to reach the northern outskirts” of the city.
“The advance on Kyiv has been rather not very organized and now they’re more or less stuck,” military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer said in Moscow.
At least 227 civilians have been killed and 525 wounded since the invasion began, the latest figures from the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights showed.
Earlier, Ukraine said that more than 2,000 civilians have died, a figure that could not be independently verified.
Additional reporting by AFP
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