The Ukrainian government rejected as “unacceptable” the Russian plan to create humanitarian corridors this Monday and evacuate the civilian population of Kiev, Mariupol, Kharkov and Sumy, as the planned route takes the evacuees to Russian cities.
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“On two occasions the Russians blocked the opening of the humanitarian corridors by bombing the convoy route,” Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for the Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories wrote on her Telegram account. Iryna Vereshchuk.
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Now the Russians say that they can open the corridors, but they want the civilians to go to Russian territory, which is absurd, cynical and unacceptable.
Russia announced shortly before a temporary ceasefire starting at 10:00 local time on Monday (2:00 a.m. Colombian time) to open humanitarian corridorss in Kiev (north), Mariupol (southeast), Kharkov (east) and Sumy (northeast) with six routes, of which four would end in Russian cities such as Rostov-on-Don (southern route) and Belgorod (east) .
The evacuation plan for Kiev also includes passing through the territory of Belarus (Gomel and Gden) with subsequent air transport to Russia. Vereshchuk noted that “the civilized world must put pressure on Russia” as Ukraine “urgently needs the humanitarian corridors” to get the civilian population out of the cities besieged by Russia with missiles and artillery.
“We have to let civilians, both Ukrainians and foreigners, leave the hot zones,” he added, while urging citizens to only believe official information from the Ukrainian authorities. “Only those can be the true and legitimate basis of humanitarian corridors on the Ukrainian territory,” he said.
In turn, the French president, Emmanuel Macrondenounced on Monday the “moral and political cynicism” of his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, who proposes humanitarian corridors to the inhabitants of various cities in Ukraine to “take them to Russia.”
“All this is not serious. It is of a moral and political cynicism that I find unbearable“, Macron said according to the excerpts released from an interview that the chain should broadcast ICL
The worrying number of refugees from the war
Ukrainians who have had to leave their country as a result of the war now number 1.73 million, of which more than a million are in neighboring Poland, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) reported on Monday.
Hungary has received 180,000 Ukrainian refugees, Slovakia 128,000, Romania 79,000 and Moldova 82,000, to which must be added some 53,000 who have fled to Russia, according to statistics updated daily by the UN agency.
UNHCR continues to estimate that the conflict could cause an exodus of up to four million Ukrainians, the equivalent of almost a tenth of the country’s population.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Philippo Grandiwarned this weekend that the refugee crisis in Ukraine is the fastest growing since World War IIl.
The flow of refugees is also the worst that Europe has experienced since World War II, a conflict that caused between 11 and 20 million people to flee their countries.
The war in Kosovo (1999) caused between 1.2 and 1.4 million Kosovar Albanian refugees, and the conflict in Bosnia (1992-95) caused 1.3 million Bosnians to leave that territory.
Babies are being born in subways and tunnels while hospitals are being bombed. All this is a terrible reality that the people of Ukraine are facing right now.
Last week, UNHCR and other UN agencies asked the international community for $1.7 billion to finance aid to Ukrainian refugees and other humanitarian operations in Ukraine and neighboring countries.
During Monday’s session of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the representative of Ukraine, Anton Korynevych, lamented the absence of the Moscow delegation at the Peace Palace, the seat of the court in The Hague.
“The fact that the Russian seats are empty speaks for itself. They are not here in this court of law, they are on a battlefield waging an aggressive war.”
The Kiev representative recalled the more than one and a half million refugees who have left the country since February 24 and the thousands of people who are hiding in the capital’s shelters.INTERNATIONAL WRITING
*With information from EFE and AFP
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