Status: 03/10/2022 10:42 a.m
While Russian troops are apparently advancing towards Kyiv, the Ukrainian government wants to evacuate civilians with the help of seven evacuation corridors today. The embattled city of Mariupol should also be there.
In Ukraine, seven escape corridors are to be opened to the civilian population today. Among them is one for Mariupol, says Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk. The port city is located in southern Ukraine on the Azov Sea. Russian troops fired on them and surrounded them.
For the third day in a row, civilians have left the city of Sumy in north-eastern Ukraine through an escape corridor. The region’s governor, Dmytro Schywyzkii, announced that a local ceasefire was in effect again. Several tens of thousands of people have already left the city besieged by Russian troops this week. The nearby settlements of Krasnopillya and Trostianets would also be evacuated. “The columns are leaving. The ceasefire has been agreed,” Schywyzkii said.
According to UN figures, a total of around 2.3 million people have fled Ukraine before the Russian war of aggression.
conflicting parties as a source
In the current situation, information on the course of the war, shelling and casualties provided by official bodies of the Russian and Ukrainian conflict parties cannot be directly checked by an independent body.
Ukraine: encirclement of Kiev progresses
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian general staff reported that the Russian armed forces continued their “offensive operation” to encircle the capital Kyiv on Thursday night. According to the situation report, there were also new attacks in the cities of Petrovsk to the north, Izyum and Hrushuvakha, both of which are to the east, Sumy and Oktyrka, each to the north-east, and Donetsk and Zaporizhia regions to the south-east.
Within a few days, the front line around the Ukrainian capital has shifted significantly: Five days ago, the Russian army was still around a hundred kilometers northeast of Kyiv, but on Wednesday it was approaching the city of Brovary, which borders Kyiv, as AFP reporters reported. Residents reported increased fighting in the region. Russian units had taken two villages in the vicinity, said 41-year-old Volodymyr from the village of Welyka Dymerka, about 15 kilometers northeast of Brovary.
Robert Kempe, WDR, currently Czernowitz: “One was shocked by all the pictures and it confirms the opinion that Russia wants to take over the whole of Ukraine”
tagesschau24 09:00 a.m., 10.3.2022
Russian Army: Control parts of Mariupol
The Ukrainian military, meanwhile, was building up defenses in cities to the north, south and east. According to the authorities, the armed forces around Kyiv held the fort against the Russian offensive.
According to the Ministry of Defense in Moscow, Russian troops have so far destroyed 2,911 military infrastructure facilities in Ukraine. The Russian army has also taken control of some neighborhoods in the besieged city of Mariupol, ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said, according to Russian news agencies.
Outrage after the bombing of a children’s hospital
Reports of the bombing of a children’s clinic in the port city of Mariupol, which has been under siege for nine days, have recently caused horror. UN Secretary-General António Guterres spoke of a “horrific” act and called for the senseless violence to stop. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused Russia of acting unscrupulously. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a video message late in the evening: “What kind of country is this, the Russian Federation, that is afraid of hospitals, afraid of maternity hospitals and destroying them?”
Reporters from the AP news agency in Mariupol witnessed the attack on the clinic, and an AP photographer documented the destruction. The ground trembled more than a kilometer away when the building was hit several times. Windows shattered, a large part of the front facade of a building was torn away. Police officers and soldiers brought victims to safety. A heavily pregnant and bleeding woman was taken away on a stretcher. Battered cars burned in the yard of the clinic complex. A crater created by the explosions was at least two stories deep. At least three people were killed and at least 17 injured, including several pregnant women, according to Ukrainian sources.
More than 1,200 dead in Mariupol
Russia denied the allegations. The claims are “fake news,” says Dmitri Polyanskii, Russia’s deputy envoy to the United Nations. The building used to be a maternity hospital that was taken over by the military and shot out of by Ukrainians. “This is how fake news is created,” he tweeted.
According to local authorities in Mariupol, more than 1,200 civilians have died in the besieged city in nine days. According to a post published on the city government’s official Telegram channel, 1,207 civilians were killed during the Russian “blockade” of the city, accompanied by a video message from Mayor Vadym Boichenko. “Nine days of genocide against the civilian population,” it said.
Summary of the current situation in the contested areas of Ukraine
Mathea Schülke, WDR, tagesschau24 09:00 a.m., March 10, 2022
No connection to Europe’s largest nuclear power plant
In the evening, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that after Chernobyl it also lost the connection to the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant. IAEA chief Rafael Grossi announced that the data connection to the monitoring devices in Zaporizhia had failed. The nuclear power plant is the largest in Europe.
Russian troops had attacked and taken Zaporizhia last week. A fire broke out on the power plant site. The reason for the disconnection is still unclear, the authority said. The IAEA had previously warned that it had lost contact with the surveillance systems in the Chernobyl nuclear ruins, which were also captured by Russian troops. The authorities later announced that they had received information from Ukraine that there had been a power outage. She sees “no critical impact on security in this case”. However, the loss of connectivity to the two nuclear sites is worrying.