Dead being buried in mass grave
KYIV/MOSCOW, Mar 9:
A Russian attack severely damaged a children’s hospital and maternity ward in the besieged port city of Mariupol, Ukrainian officials said today, as citizens trying to escape shelling on the outskirts of Kyiv streamed toward the capital amid warnings from the West that Moscow’s invasion is about to take a more brutal and indiscriminate turn.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on Twitter that there were “people, children under the wreckage” of the hospital and called the strike an “atrocity.” Authorities said they were trying to establish how many people had been killed or wounded.
Mariupol’s city council said on its social media site that the damage was “colossal.”
Meanwhile, civilians trying to escape the Kyiv suburb of Irpin were forced to make their way across the slippery wooden planks of a makeshift bridge, because the Ukrainians blew up the concrete span to Kyiv days ago to slow the Russian advance, With sporadic gunfire echoing behind them, firefighters dragged an elderly man to safety in a wheelbarrow, a child gripped the hand of a helping soldier, and a woman inched her way along cradling a fluffy cat inside her winter coat. On the other side, they trudged past a crashed van with the words “Our Ukraine” written in the dust coating its windows.
“We have a short window of time at the moment,” said Yevhen Nyshchuk, a member of Ukraine’s territorial defence forces. “Even if there is a ceasefire right now, there is a high risk of shells falling at any moment.” Authorities annou-nced the new cease-fire this morning to allow thousands of civilians to escape from towns around Kyiv as well as the southern cities of Mariupol, Enerhodar and Volnovakha, Izyum in the east and Sumy in the northeast. Previous attempts to establish safe evacuation corridors largely failed because of Russian attacks.
It was not immediately clear whether anyone was able to leave other cities, but people streamed out of Kyiv’s suburbs, many headed for the city center, even as explosions were heard in the capital and air raid sirens sounded repeatedly. From there, they planned to board trains bound for western Ukrainian regions not under attack.
In Mariupol, local authorities hurried to bury the dead in a mass grave. City workers dug a trench some 25 meters (yards) long at one of the city’s old cemeteries and made a sign of the cross as they pushed bodies wrapped in carpets or bags over the edge.
Thousands of people are thought to have been killed, both civilians and soldiers, in two weeks of fighting since President Vladimir Putin’s forces invaded. The U.N. Estimates more than 2 million people have fled the country, the biggest exodus of refugees in Europe since the end of World War II.
The fighting cut power to the decommissioned Chernobyl nuclear plant, raising safety concerns about the spent fuel that is stored at the site and must be kept cool. But the U.N. Nuclear watchdog agency said it saw “no critical impact on safety” from the loss of power.
The crisis in Ukraine is likely to get worse as Russian forces step up their bombardment of cities in response to stronger than expected resistance. Russian losses have been “far in excess” of what Putin and his generals expected, CIA Director William Burns said Tuesday.
An intensified push by Russian forces could mean “an ugly next few weeks,” Burns told a congressional committee, warning that Putin is likely to “grind down the Ukrainian military with no regard for civilian casualties.”
Britain’s Defence Ministry said Wednesday that fighting continued northwest of Kyiv. The cities of Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Sumy and Mariupol were being heavily shelled and remained encircled by Russian forces.
The Ukrainian military, meanwhile, is building up defenses in cities in the north, south and east, and forces around Kyiv are “holding the line” against the Russian offensive, authorities said.
A series of air raid alerts Wednesday morning urged residents of Kyiv to go to bomb shelters amid fears of incoming missiles. Explosions were later heard.
Meanwhile, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which was taken over by Russian forces last month, has stopped transmitting data to the IAEA, the UN atomic watchdog has said, expressing deep concern for the staff working under Russian troops at the nuclear site in Northern Ukraine.
The Chernobyl site is not currently operational and handling of nuclear material has been halted. The facility holds decommissioned reactors as well as radioactive waste facilities, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said, citing information from Ukraine’s nuclear regulator.
IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi “indicated that remote data transmission from safeguards monitoring systems installed at the Chornobyl NPP had been lost,” the Vienna-based agency said in a statement on Tuesday.
“The Agency is looking into the status of safeguards monitoring systems in other locations in Ukraine and will provide further information soon,” it said.
The agency said it had been informed by Ukrainian officials that it is becoming “increasingly urgent” to rotate staff for the “safe management” of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, where some 210 personnel have been working for almost two weeks straight since Russian forces seized control of the facility.
Meanwhile, Russia today said the situation at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is controlled jointly by Russian troops, Ukrainian specialists and the National Guard.
“Currently, control over the situation at the Chernobyl NPP is being exercised jointly by Russian servicemen, Ukrainian specialists, the plant’s civilian personnel, and that country’s National Guard,” Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
Ukraine’s allegations about 20-fold radiation increase at the Chernobyl plant are not true, Russia’s state-run TASS news agency quoted her as saying.
Meanwhile, under steady Russian bombardment, workers in Ukraine’s besieged southern port city of Mariupol are hastily and unceremoniously burying scores of dead Ukrainian civilians and soldiers in a mass grave.
With morgues overflowing and more corpses uncollected in homes, city officials decided they could not wait to hold individual burials.
A deep trench about 25 meters (27 yards) long dug in an old cemetery in the heart of the city is filling up with bodies collected by municipal social service workers from morgues and private homes.
Some are brought wrapped in carpets or plastic bags. Forty came Tuesday, another 30 so far Wednesday. They include civilian victims of shelling on the city and soldiers, as well as civilians who died of disease or natural causes.
Other city workers are also bringing bodies so the numbers being buried are quickly rising and the total in the long grave is now unclear.
Meanwhile, exhausted but elated, around 600 Indian students, who waged a tough battle for survival before being pulled out of war-battered Ukrainian city of Sumy, are now on way to Poland on a train from where they will be flown back home likely tomorrow.
Indian envoy to Ukraine Partha Satpathy flagged off the special train at Lviv railway station, with its war-weary passengers smiling broadly, flashing the victory sign and shouting ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’.
“Ambassador flags off special train with 600 Indian students from Sumy University at Lviv Railway Station. They will travel to Poland and are expected to board evacuation flights to India tomorrow. Be Safe Be Strong,” the Indian embassy in Ukraine tweeted.
“Indian students from Sumy on board the special train organised with assistance of Ukranian authorities. Mission will continue to facilitate their movement westwards. Bringing back our students safely and securely will remain our priority,” it said.
Lviv is a city in western Ukraine, around 70 km from the border with Poland.
India is set to have the last evacuation flight under ‘Operation Ganga’, the evacuation mission that was launched on February 26 in the wake of the war in Ukraine. More that 17,100 Indian nationals fleeing the war in Ukraine were evacuated from Romania, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Moldova after they crossed over to these countries. (Agencies)
Follow our WhatsApp channel
